![]() ![]() ![]() “Nitrogen anxiety” entered into the language with little regard for the proper procedure of the DSM, and the integrity of the vast levee system that purportedly held back potential surge was again cast into doubt. The upcoming hurricane season was predicted to be especially active, the so-called dead zone was expanding to record circumference along the Gulf Coast, and fertilizer plants seemed to be literally exploding all over the place. ![]() The summer of 2013 was a particularly uneasy one in South Louisiana. The thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, on the cleansing function of decadence, and Carl Jung, on health and wholeness, allow us to see the confluence between Casal’s and Nervo’s narratives and the international intellectual milieu that informed Latin American modernismo. An examination of historical and literary discourses that sought to define the ideal citizen in opposition to modernista decadence roots the texts in a Latin American context. Importantly, these writers posit that national discourses aimed at redirecting citizens away from their own instincts and toward a narrowly and externally defined heteronormative lifestyle, and that this project debilitated the individual, thereby affecting national progress. The narratives in question suggest that creativity depends on the pleasure and catharsis of decadence. ![]() We will also examine a selection of short prose by Nervo published in the Revista de América (Journal of America) before 1915. Literary texts include Casal’s “La cámara doble” (The Dual Chamber), “La última illusion” (The Last Hope), and selections from Cuentos amargos (Bitter Tales) and Historias amargas (Bitter Stories), all from 1890. Based on a reading of select prose by Julián del Casal and Amado Nervo, this article reveals a tendency in modernista fiction to invert notions of unhealthy modernista decadence and salubrious bourgeois morality. ![]()
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