Raging Against Oblivion: Art, Money, and Memory in the Nineteenth Century Gilded Age
Why do writers write, painters paint, or builders build? Why do we seek to memorialize the dead, as August Belmont did his daughter Jane Pauline Belmont with this very chapel? What is this human passion to make a mark in our brief time on earth, to be remembered, to fight against the tide of oblivion, encapsulated in the Latin aphorism, Ars longa, vita brevis?
Dean de la Motte has degrees in comparative literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The editor and author of two books and numerous scholarly articles on nineteenth-century French literature and the teaching of literature, he recently published his first novel, Oblivion: The Lost Diaries of Branwell Brontë (Valley Press, UK, 2022; paperback 2025). As Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Salve Regina University, he has taught courses on “The Literary Landscape of Gilded Age Newport” and recently took a turn as an extra on The Gilded Age (Season 3, 2025).
Dr. de la Motte’s lecture will focus on different kinds of striving or ambition in the context of the rapidly changing society of the nineteenth century, on the tension between financial and artistic success, and on the desire to be noticed and, ultimately, remembered that is so fundamental to an understanding of the architectural treasures of the Gilded Age in general and Newport in particular.