THE 'MOVING' LINES OF NEO-BAROQUE IN WILL SELF'S DORIAN: AN IMITATION.

This essay aims at reading Will Self's Wildean Dorian: An Imitation (2002) as part of an increasingly popular neo-baroque style. Against the minimalism of past decades, there seems to be a proliferation of things baroque at the turn of the millennium. We will see how Self's novel fits the excess and movement characteristic of this aesthetics (against the harmony and stasis of classicism) and will analyse its purpose. Excess and movement should not be viewed exclusively as aesthetic concepts, since they involve the reader politically and ethically. As I will attempt to demonstrate, Dorian: An Imitation relies on a complex (baroque) structure and on intertextuality to meet this end. The effect of neo-baroque manifestations on the one who looks, hears or reads must be inscribed in the ethics of affects, the language of new technologies and the awe-inspiring power of the sublime. With this purpose, I will make extensive use of the concept of line as a perennial metaphor for artistic representation running from Hogarth to Newman, Derrida and Deleuze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]