THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Oscar Wilde

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the life and work of Oscar Wilde. I begin with a recitation of Wilde’s dramatic life story with its consciously shaped tragic arc—the tragedy he lived but could not write—with passing remarks on most of his major work and on his Aestheticist philosophy. I elaborate on his revolutionary literary theory, which sunders art from mimesis and criticism itself from truth: a postmodernism of the fin de siècle. Then, in the light of this theory, I offer a formalist interpretation of The Importance of Being Earnest. I reads the comedy as a device for producing Wildean epigrams, among them epigrams that mock Victorian sententiousness, epigrams that express Wilde’s own Aestheticism, and, finally, epigrams of pure contentless wit anticipating the linguistic experiments of high modernism and postmodernism in writers like Stein, Joyce, Stevens, and Ashbery. I consider critics on The Importance of Being Earnest: Terence Brown on the play as the utopia of the dandy; Camille Paglia on the play as “reactionary prose poem,” the first piece of modernist fascist art; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on the play as celebration of the “avunculate,” those aunts and uncles who model for the budding queer child the pleasure and promise of non-normative sexualities. Finally, in anticipation of the next episode on Conrad and early modernist fiction, I emphasize the play’s withering attitude toward the Victorian novel as the antitype to its Aestheticism. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below.