IPP Workshop Series

Performative Imaginations: Dandyism between Literature and Reality

In this workshop, we will look at the origins of dandyism through the texts and contexts which shaped it, focusing on its English iterations. Through queer theory, we will examine the gendered contexts in which dandyism was imagined in literature, and practised by real life dandies. Concepts of performativity grounded in queer theory will help us analyse the simultaneously developing discourses and histories of dandyism. Among the questions thereby addressed are the following: What did dandyism mean in specific contexts and for specific people? How did dandyism intervene in the existing gender conventions? What role did style and fashion play in the (self)creation of a dandy? What is the legacy of dandyism? A closer look at this complex interaction between the imagined literary dandy and lived reality will be given through the case studies of two paradigmatic essays that defined literary dandyism by Charles Baudelaire and Barbey D’Aurevilly. We will further consider the case of an exemplary literary and real life dandy – Oscar Wilde. 

//Teona Micevska