Prof. Matt Potolsky’s Public Lecture: Decadent Infrastructure

When: Tuesday, May 13, 2025, 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
Where: BLOC Cinema, ArtsOne Building, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4PA

IHSS Visiting Fellow Professor Matt Potolsky’s (University of Utah, USA) lecture 

This talk will draw from Matt's current book project, which offers a theory for how and why literary decadence, a nineteenth-century phenomenon associated with the advanced urban core of Britain and France, became such a fecund influence for writers on the peripheries of modernity. Matt argues that the concept of decadence had, from its earliest adumbration, served as a way of figuring anomalies of global capitalism, particularly the phenomenon Leon Trotsky calls uneven and combined development. Matt looks in this presentation at a surprisingly common element in peripheral decadent texts: a set piece in which the decadent protagonist reflects openly on the condition of economic "backwardness." Drawing on texts by fin-de-siècle writers from Columbia, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Russia, and the United States, Matt argues that such reflections make an acute awareness of uneven and combined development a central element of the decadent sensibility.

 

About the Speaker

Matt Potolsky is Professor of English at the University of Utah, where he teaches courses in nineteenth-century literature and critical theory. He specializes in the literature and culture of fin-de-siècle Britain and France, and also writes on the representation of secrets and secrecy, and on the classical concept of mimesis. Matt's most recent book is The National Security Sublime: On the Aesthetics of Government Secrecy (2019).

About the Lecture

The lecture is organised by Dr Angie Dunstan (School of the Arts, Department of English) and supported by the IHSS Visiting Fellowship Scheme.