AKC 9 T&RS – Autumn Term 2007 – Afterlives
06/12/07
AKC 9 – 06 DECEMBER 2007
AFTERLIFE BEFORE DEATH: THE IDEA OF LATE STYLE
DR GORDON MCMULLAN, ENGLISH DEPARTMENT, KING'S COLLEGE
LONDON
1)
instances of late style/comparisons with early style
Michelangelo, Renoir, Turner, Corinth, James, Shostakovich, Beethoven
2)
definitions of late style
Havelock Ellis on Rodin: ‘With this final development [he says] the large sweep of
Rodin’s art was completed. There was no further development possible. He began as a
minute realist and in that early stage his work even caused offence because it was said
to be merely photographic. Then, during the greater and most active part of his career,
he developed his characteristic style of deliberate exaggeration, the heightening of
natural proportions for the ends of art. Finally that stage, too, passed away, and this
last period arrived of large simple masses, softened and alleviated of all semblance to
reality, gliding into a vast dim dream’.
3)
Shakespeare as test-case
Edward Dowden on Shakespeare: in the late plays, there is ‘a certain abandonment of
the common joy of the world, a certain remoteness from the usual pleasures and
sadnesses of life, and at the same time, all the more, a tender bending over those who
are like children still absorbed in their individual joys and sorrows. The spirit of these
last plays is that of serenity which results from fortitude, and the recognition of
human frailty; all of them express a deep sense of the need of repentance and the duty
of forgiveness’.
4)
what are ‘the late plays’?
Pericles, Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale, Tempest, Cardenio, Henry VIII, The Two Noble
Kinsmen
5)
problems of late style
genre, style, chronology, collaboration
late style and the question of old age: King Lear as a late play?
late style and complicity
late style as generative of late work
late style and theology
Reading List
on art
Kenneth Clark, The Artist Grows Old, The Rede Lecture 1970 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1972)
Hugo Munsterberg, The Crown of Life: Artistic Creativity in Old Age (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983)
Simon Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press,
1999), esp. pp. 666-7.
AKC 9 T&RS – Autumn Term 2007 – Afterlives
06/12/07
on music
Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music. Fragments and Texts, ed.
Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity, 1998; first published in
German, 1993)
Maynard Solomon, Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California, Press, 2003)
Rose Rosengard Subotnik, ‘Adorno’s Diagnosis of Beethoven’s Late Style: Early
Symptom of a Fatal Condition’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 29
(1976), 251-53
on Shakespeare
H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy (London: Methuen, 1938),
Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art (London: Henry S.
King, 1875)
John Porter Houston, Shakespearean Sentences: A Study in Style and Syntax (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988)
Cyrus Hoy, The Hyacinth Room: An Investigation into the Nature of Comedy,
Tragedy, & Tragicomedy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964)
Marco Mincoff, Things Supernatural and Causeless: Shakespearean Romance
(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992; first published Sofia, 1987)
Kenneth Muir, Last Periods of Shakespeare, Racine, and Ibsen (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 1961)
Russ McDonald, Shakespeare’s Late Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006)
Gordon McMullan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the
Proximity of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Cynthia Marshall, Shakespearean Eschatology: Last Things and Last Plays
(Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991)
Simon Palfrey, Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1997)
C. J. Sisson, The Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare, Annual Shakespeare Lecture of
the British Academy, Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. 20 (London: Milford,
1934)
on late style in general
Hermann Broch, ‘The Style of the Mythical Age,’ introductory essay to Rachel
Bespaloff, On The Iliad, trans. Mary McCarthy (New York: Pantheon, 1947)
Havelock Ellis, Impressions and Comments, Third Series, 1920-1923 (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1924)
Michael Millgate, Testamentary Acts: Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992)
Karen Painter and Thomas Crow (eds), Late Thoughts: Reflections on Artists and
Composers at Work, Issues and Debates 14 (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2006)
Edward Said, On Late Style (London: Bloomsbury, 2006)
Full details about the AKC course, including copies of the handouts, can be found on
the AKC website at: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/akc. If you have any queries please contact
the AKC Course Administrator on ext 2333 or via email at dean@kcl.ac.uk. Please
make a note in your diary that the AKC Examination will take place on Monday 21
April between 14.30 and 16.30.
If you haven’t done so already YOU MUST REGISTER FOR THE COURSE using
the form on the website. You will need to register for the exam separately,
information will be provided next semester.