Henry Bowles

Periodically throughout human history, literature has found itself in ill repute. From 5th-century Greece to 17th-century Persia, accusations of self-absorption, subjectivism, and non-utility have served as the underpinning of attacks against literature critics deemed “decadent”—accusations that still sound periodically in the present day.

Henry Bowles, a PhD candidate in comparative literature, studies the rhetoric surrounding accusations of decadence, or literary decline, spanning twelve centuries and four languages. By broadening his research beyond the usual scope of literary study along the axes of both time and space, Bowles hopes to uncover something of the commonality of discourse surrounding literature—and by extension, all art—in cultural contexts usually studied in isolation.

In his work, Bowles pushes back against this prevailing practice of literary studies, arguing that an excessive concern with the local, particular, and so-called authentic stands in the way of uncovering the commonality of our existence as cultural agents. “I’m concerned with what unites us as human beings despite ostensible differences in time and space,” Bowles says.

Bowles finds that the rhetoric of critical attacks on so-called decadent literature is remarkably similar across cultures and centuries. The truth-value of their accusations aside, critics of literary practice tend to fall back on common tropes such as the perceived divorce of personal perception from extrinsic truth. In doing so, according to Bowles, they often collapse important distinctions such as custom and reality.

Bowles posits that occasionally, critical consensus builds and allows literature that might have otherwise been deemed decadent to slip by unnoticed. In this way, Bowles says, “the history of decadence might be the secret history of modernism.”