Creator:
Contributor:
Gołębiowska, Urszula - red. nauk. ; Kubasiewicz, Mirosława - red. nauk.
Title:
A sense of ending. Henry James and Adorno`s "Spätstil"
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Subject and Keywords:
modernism ; aesthetics ; late style ; organicism ; revision
Abstract:
While we are perfectly justified in acknowledging the emergence of a new idiom in Henry James`s works after 1900 (the date is necessarily tentative), we should see in his so-called late style not only a mere rhetorical or linguistic phenomenon but a result of existential processes transcending questions of style, language and novelistic technique. ; The main proposition set forth in the article is that it might prove interesting and critically illuminating to situate James`s late texts in the context of Theodor W. Adorno`s notion of "Spätstil" (late style) as developed by the German philosopher in his essays on Beethoven`s last compositions. ; James`s urge to complicate and indeed question his own work, to forward and assist its own exhaustion and dissolution, to point to its existential insufficiency and irrelevance, is a critical impulse conspicuously compatible with the Adornian concept. The ends of such a critique is a heightened awareness of the inadequacy of the medium and an assumption of art as necessarily anti-mimetic and anti-realistic. As is well known, this tendency informed James`s last writings, and it gave them a distinct, unmistakable flavor.
Publisher:
Zielona Góra: Oficyna Wydawnicza Uniwersytetu Zielonogórskiego
Date:
Resource Type:
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Pages:
Source:
Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu Zielonogórskiego: Seria Scripta Humana, tom 14