Littérature fin de siècle, littérature fin de langue?
Fin de Siècle Literature, Fin de Langue Literature?

Linguistic Imaginaries around 1900 in Remy de Gourmont’s Essays

Summary/Abstract: The “fin-de-siècle” in France is pervaded by a particular concern about the future of the French language, which Remy de Gourmont echoes in several texts and articles (notably Esthétique de la langue française, La Destinée des langues and L’Influence étrangère). He identifies internal threats, those of academics and primary schools accused of killing the language and of stifling the creative impulse expressed in fruitful deformations. He also mentions external threats, demonstrating on this occasion a virulent linguistic xenophobia towards foreign influences that would threaten the purity of French language and literature. The question, which reveals a fear of losing one’s own form, is aesthetic as well as political. Gourmont hesitates, however, between a posture of quasi-pamphleteer and that of a detached observer, a sign of his taste for paradox, but also, more generally, of the difficulty of reflecting on the end and decadence in both nationalistic and cosmopolitan era, where external, “barbaric” influences can be considered as either mortifying or regenerating.

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