Late Style Research Articles

Making it New: Sappho, Mary Barnard and American Modernism

Contrary to the pessimism of American editors in the 1950s who told Mary Barnard that "Sappho would never sell," Barnard‘s Sappho: A New Translation (1958) is now in its fifty-fifth year of continuous print by the University of California Press. Expressing the bare, lyrical intensity of Sappho‘s poetry without recourse to excessive linguistic ornament or narrative padding, Barnard‘s translation is widely regarded as the best in modern idiom, with leading translation studies scholar Yopie Prins asserting that "Barnard‘s Sappho is often read as if it is Sappho." This essay will examine how Barnard managed this remarkable achievement, linking Sappho to the American modernist project to "make it new," to quote Ezra Pound. New archival material is used to show how Barnard declared herself "A Would-Be Sappho" as early as 1930. The essay begins with the reasons why Sappho was appealing to those with modernist sensibilities, reading the development of Imagists Pound, H.D. and Richard Aldington against the backdrop of the public excitement that surrounded the major excavations of Sappho‘s corpus at the turn of the century. The essay then zooms-in on the ways in which Sappho was a vital element in the formulation of Barnard‘s identity as a late modernist writer, particularly examining her appropriation of the imagery from Sappho‘s fragments as Barnard developed her "spare but musical" late Imagist style in her poems of the 1930s and 1940s. If Barnard‘s deep absorption of Sappho in her emergent years enabled her to find a means of producing American free verse in the modernist tradition, then there was an intriguing reciprocation: it was this very "Sapphic modernism," I contend, that enabled Barnard to find a means of translating Sappho to be read "as if it is Sappho." The essay concludes with a new interpretation of the significance of Barnard‘s appropriation of Sappho in her own poetry, noting how, peculiarly, Barnard drew out of her Sappho connection a thoroughly American idiom to pit against European literary autonomy, on a par with William Carlos Williams‘s own attempts to produce a thoroughly American verse. In making Sappho new for modern Americans, Barnard was, I find, making a new language for modern American poetry.

Late Style and Speaking Out: J. A. Symonds's In the Key of Blue

This article examines In the Key of Blue (1893)—an essay collection by John Addington Symonds—as a case study in queer public utterance during the early 1890s. Viewed through the critical lens of late style, as theorised by Edward Said, the evolution of this project, from compilation through to reader reception, reveals Symonds's determination to “speak out” on the subject of homosexuality. Paradoxically, In the Key of Blue was thus a timely and untimely work: it belonged to a brief period of increased visibility and expressiveness when dealing with male same-sex desire, spearheaded by a younger generation of Decadent writers, but it also cut against the grain of nineteenth-century social taboo and legal repression. Symonds's essay collection brought together new and previously unpublished work with examples of his writing for the periodical press. These new combinations, appearing together for the first time, served to facilitate new readings and new inferences, bringing homosexual themes to the fore. This article traces the dialogic structure of In the Key of Blue , its strategies for articulating homosexual desire, and examines the response of reviewers, from the hostile to celebratory.

The Fate of Sex: Late Style and “The Chaos of Eros”

The Fate of Sex: Late Style and “The Chaos of Eros”

Emerson’s Decomposition: Parnassus

This essay offers a new reading of Emerson’s late redactorial and critical work that evinces a correspondence between bodily and literary decomposition. I argue that the critical value of Parnassus (1874) lies precisely in its demonstration of Emerson’s principles of composition, in particular a late compositional style that I define as Emerson’s “decomposition.” The very difficulty in “authorizing” such a text makes us attend to the role of citation and quotation in Emerson’s work, in larger proprietary questions of nineteenth-century authorship, in the twentieth-century discourse of the “death and rebirth” of the author, and in a current age when digital dissemination threatens copyright value and challenges writers to reconfigure conceptions of creative composition in formally innovative works. A revised formal appraisal of Parnassus, in its classificatory, literary, and biological contexts, is not only instrumental for Emerson scholars, but can also help bridge the ample body of theoretical work on the question of the author with the undertheorized critical study of the anthology as a genre.

Henry James and the Queerness of Style by Kevin Ohi (review)

Reviewed by: Henry James and the Queerness of Style by Kevin Ohi Ruth Bernard Yeazell Review of Kevin Ohi. Henry James and the Queerness of Style. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. 228 pp. $25 (paperback). Much recent criticism works to defamiliarize the objects it studies. The impulse is particularly strong when the objects in question are realist novels, whose presumed transparency and normative plotting the critic seeks to counter by uncovering signs [End Page E-4] of trouble or resistance not immediately evident to most readers. But what to do when a novelist’s style is already so disorienting that there is little danger of readers’ consuming his fictions too easily? For those of us who love Henry James and who wish to pass that love on to others, the question of whether—and how—to translate his late style into more accessible terms is a constant challenge. Some choose to err on the side of clarity, at the risk of rendering the novels far more conventional and unexciting than they in fact are. Others insist on registering and even magnifying the difficulties, so as to remain faithful to what Kevin Ohi terms the “queerness” of James’s style. Drawing evocatively on Gilles Deleuze’s contention that “a great writer is always like a foreigner in the language in which he expresses himself,” Ohi places himself firmly in this camp, as he sets out to show how “the foreign language murmuring audible” in James’s texts produces a “corrosive effect . . . on received forms of meaning, representation, and identity” (1). The result is a book that proves dazzlingly brilliant and frustratingly opaque by turns: an often stunning demonstration of the semantics and syntax of James’s alien tongue that occasionally pushes its case—and the convolutions of its own prose—to the edge of incomprehensibility. After an introduction that seeks to show how James’s theorizing about the novel in “The Art of Fiction” (1884) and “The Future of the Novel” (1899) works to undermine not just moralizing accounts of the form but—more surprisingly—mimetic ones as well, Ohi divides his study into four chapters. These take up in sequence The Golden Bowl (1904); The Wings of the Dove (1902); a miscellany of late biographical texts, including in rough order James’s last published essay (a preface to Rupert Brooke’s Letters from America that appeared in 1916), A Small Boy and Others (1913), “Is there a Life after Death?” (1910), and the Introduction to The Tempest (1907); and, finally, The Ambassadors (1903). Apart from a passing allusion in the opening pages of the Ambassadors chapter, Ohi says almost nothing about this unconventional arrangement, but the deliberate a-chronology clearly accords with his strong desire to counter the lure of biography. Henry James and the Queerness of Style resists not just the order in which texts are written and published but the idea that life precedes art—or that it takes a homosexual man to produce “queer” writing. Indeed, one of the great strengths of Ohi’s argument is his consistent refusal to identify the writer’s style with his sexual preferences, or even to read the fiction for representations of homoerotic desire. Though he understands the appeal of recent biographical and novelistic attempts to bring James out of the closet, he rightly mistrusts the impulse to conflate art and life. Even Colm Tóibín’s “sometimes very affecting novel” The Master understandably troubles him, by seeming to imply that James’s fiction had its origin in certain formative moments of experience missed—as if the “life” that James somehow failed to lead were finally of more concern to us than the one he created by means of his writing (18). In his discussion of The Ambassadors, Ohi aptly characterizes the Pococks as “one of the great representatives of stupidity in the history of the English and American novel” (162). And while he does not make the connection, there is a worrying continuity between their reductive vision of what is “really” at issue between Chad and Marie de Vionnet and our own concern to ferret out the truth about James’s sexuality. At the same time, as Ohi...

“Summoning Your Youth at Will”: Memory, Time, and Aging in the Work of Penelope Lively, Margaret Atwood, and Doris Lessing

“Summoning Your Youth at Will”Memory, Time, and Aging in the Work of Penelope Lively, Margaret Atwood, and Doris Lessing Susan Watkins (bio) In a 2009 interview with Sarah Crown in the Guardian newspaper, the novelist Penelope Lively remarked that “in old age you can close your eyes and summon your youth at will. As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage.” She added: “the idea that memory is linear … is nonsense.”1 Aging is clearly a topic of increasing interest for a number of contemporary women writers, and new critical approaches to aging and gender in this field are beginning to burgeon. The focus in the majority of critical work has often been on how literary texts address the theme or subject of aging; however, as Lively’s comments in the Guardian interview suggest, and as I will argue here, aging is capable of generating in fiction a new relationship among time, memory, family history, and form. Through a close study of Penelope Lively’s Family Album, which was published in 2009, and with briefer allusion to Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (2000) and Doris Lessing’s Love, Again (1996), this essay will argue that these writers’ engagement with aging and gender allows them to create their own kind of “late style,” to borrow from Edward Said. Lively in particular draws on fictional devices (such as the deliberate refusal of narrative tension or suspense) that make us consider how we rethink the pattern of a life as we age. This essay begins with a brief survey of recent feminist writing about aging, arguing that this work tends to focus on how aging is represented, rather than how it might impact form. The critical work that does pay attention to the relationship between aging and form, or the idea of “late style,” will then be considered, particularly the work of Edward Said in his On Late Style. However, the majority of work on “late style” does not consider the issue of gender. The novelists we are concerned with here have all made comments in interviews and essays, which will then be discussed, about the importance of the gendered aging process in allowing them to rethink structure and form in fiction. However, I want to make a distinction between The Blind Assassin and [End Page 222] Love, Again, which both focus on the protagonist reflecting on her past life in relation to the present, and Family Album, which uses the family home as the central shaping consciousness. Lessing’s and Atwood’s novels emphasize the limitations of individual perception by focusing on vision, blindness, and the photograph or portrait as a “witness” to the past. In contrast Lively’s text makes use of the idea of the collage or kaleidoscope as a metaphor for shifting perspectives, but also as a device to structure the novel itself. In doing so, it references both high and low art forms and acknowledges women’s domestic work as part of their art. Thus, for Lively, I argue, aging generates a focus on the work involved in maintaining a home and parenting a child; she sees these as inseparable from the work of writing. The essay will then explore how the focus on domestic and emotional labor, and its relation to writing, is connected in Lively’s novel to the innovative formal device of refusal of suspense. The generation and final resolution of suspense around the secret of biological parentage is key to Blind Assassin and is intimately connected with the secret of authorship, but I argue that Family Album refuses that connection, perceiving it to be old and tired. This resistance to revelation can be instructively compared with what Said refers to as the unproductive productiveness of “late style” and its refusal of conventional narratives of maturation and development. The centrality of suspense in popular fiction, especially in romance writing, suggests that all three novelists can be understood as self-consciously deploying the strategies of romantic fiction, even if this is often ironic. This ironic, self-conscious use of popular forms can also be seen as characteristic of middlebrow fiction: the final part of the essay will discuss how all three writers...

Late Style—Yuri I. Manin Looking Back on a Life in Mathematics–A Book Review

The expression “Late Style” derives from Adorno’s 1937 essay on the Spatstil of Beethoven. The phrase was used as the title of a course at Columbia University and later of a posthumous book by Edward Said, who explained that “Late Style” refers to “the way in which the work of some great artists and writers acquires a new idiom towards the end of their lives.” Here one is viewing, however, “artistic lateness not [necessarily] as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.” With the subtitle “Looking Back on a Life in Mathematics”, it is also the chosen title for a documentary about Yuri Manin.

Death in Veniceand Beyond: Benjamin Britten’s Late Works

This article analyzes Benjamin Britten’s late works through the lenses of late style discourse and theories of aging, showing how these final compositions can be read as a reflection of the ways in which Britten’s illness and physical disability in the last years of his life prematurely ushered the composer into ‘old age’ and its attendant physical and psychological difficulties. From Death in Venice on, Britten’s compositions display an unmistakable preoccupation with mortality, both in terms of subject matter and in terms of an even further finessed concision of musical style. While the stylistic decisions in these last works cannot be divorced from Britten’s very real sense and eventual acceptance of the nearness of his own death, neither can they be wholly accounted for by it, marking as they do an undiminished capacity for creative achievement in the midst of significantly diminished physical capabilities.

Marginal Modernity: The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce by Leonardo F. Lisi (review)

Reviewed by: Marginal Modernity: The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce by Leonardo F. Lisi Andrew Goldstone (bio) MARGINAL MODERNITY: THE AESTHETICS OF DEPENDENCY FROM KIERKEGAARD TO JOYCE, by Leonardo F. Lisi. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. xvi + 336 pp. $45.00. What does literary modernism look like when seen from unaccustomed places? In the last decade, scholars have sought to expand “modernism” to cover an ever-wider geographical, linguistic, and cultural terrain.1 Leonardo F. Lisi’s wide-ranging book joins this effort to reorient modernism, operating from a base in Scandinavian studies; it covers writings in Danish, Norwegian, German, and English. Lisi argues that the aesthetics of major European modernist pioneers draw on Scandinavian models. His work reminds us that, though recent modernist studies have been global in ambition, tending to compare Europe and the United States to the postcolonial world, European modernism is itself by no means uniform; it has its centers and peripheries too. In the new modernist studies as in the old, the “big” languages threaten to eclipse the “small” ones, with “global modernism” turning into a shorthand for global English [End Page 539] modernism. Marginal Modernity builds a convincing case for widespread Scandinavian influence on the first generation of modernists, above all via Henrik Ibsen. Joyce’s early reverence for Ibsen is only one example among many. For Lisi, the contribution of the nineteenth-century Danish and Norwegian literary vanguards to modernism has not been understood. Scandinavia, he claims, developed a distinctive philosophical aesthetics, the “aesthetics of dependency.” This aesthetics contrasts with two better-known modernist tendencies: the aspiration to the unified, autonomous work and the embrace of formal fragmentation.2 The aesthetics of dependency emerges in Søren Kierkegaard and Ibsen and then, Lisi claims, makes itself felt in the signal early modernisms of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, Joyce’s “The Dead,” Hugo von Hoffmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter, and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.3 Readers expecting an analysis of political, economic, or cultural dependency will be disappointed. Lisi brackets these concerns to focus on “aesthetic” problems, by which he means the “organization of text-immanent elements” (8). A text exemplifies the aesthetics of dependency when “the purposeful relation of its parts depend[s] on an interpretative perspective not coextensive with the logic of those parts themselves” (6). The interrelations of aesthetic parts matter, says Lisi, because they are “the artistic enactment or representation of fundamental forms of knowledge and experience” (8). Lisi’s philosophical themes make for some difficult reading, especially in the book’s dense first part, which traces debates in epistemology from Immanuel Kant, by way of Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Hölderlin, to Kierkegaard. The latter is the hero of the book; Lisi presents his theology as a novel and enduring answer to the questions raised by Kant. Lisi’s approach will appeal most to scholars working on the intersection of literature and philosophy, especially Continental philosophy from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to Martin Heidegger. Those who do not count themselves among those specialists will be more interested in the literary interpretations Lisi derives. His interpretive method is, as he says, “close readings” (18)—that is, detailed textual interpretations that mostly remain within the boundaries of individual texts, with occasional excursions to other writings by the author under consideration. Social and cultural contexts make only brief appearances, principally in the fascinating pages that interpret the nineteenth-century Danish playwright Johan Ludvig Heiberg in terms of Denmark’s political and economic development in the epoch after the Congress of Vienna (81–86). According to Lisi, all the protomodernist works he examines share a “fourfold structure” that characterizes the aesthetics of dependency [End Page 540] (53). In each text, Lisi identifies a basic opposition at the level of theme or form; argues that the ending of the text promises to transcend the opposition; and claims that this ending is nonetheless not motivated from within the text but rather sends us searching for a fourth element to make sense of the links among the other three. Thus, The Wings of the Dove opposes the opacity of Jamesian late style to the...

Death in Venice and Beyond: Benjamin Britten's Late Works

This article analyzes Benjamin Britten's late works through the lenses of late style discourse and theories of aging, showing how these final compositions can be read as a reflection of the ways in which Britten's illness and physical disability in the last years of his life prematurely ushered the composer into 'old age' and its attendant physical and psychological difficulties. From Death in Venice on, Britten's compositions display an unmistakable preoccupation with mortality, both in terms of subject matter and in terms of an even further finessed concision of musical style. While the stylistic decisions in these last works cannot be divorced from Britten's very real sense and eventual acceptance of the nearness of his own death, neither can they be wholly accounted for by it, marking as they do an undiminished capacity for creative achievement in the midst of significantly diminished physical capabilities.

Bethan Jones, The Last Poems of D. H. Lawrence: Shaping a Late Style.

Bethan Jones, The Last Poems of D. H. Lawrence: Shaping a Late Style.

‘Any Dark Saying’: Louis MacNeice in the Nineteen Fifties

The contours of Louis MacNeice's career are rarely contested: from the high point of his nineteen thirties work, reaching a crescendo with Autumn Journal (1939), he drifted into a slump, reaching a nadir with two collections from the early nineteen fifties, Ten Burnt Offerings (1952) and Autumn Sequel (1954), before reviving to develop a startling new style at the end of the decade. The historical moment clearly demanded stylistic renegotiation, both for poets living in Ireland and those outside it, but in comparison with the new styles developed coterminously by Clarke and Kavanagh, MacNeice's late work is stark, suggestive of nightmarish solipsism and a breakdown of social cohesion. If the failure of his volumes from the early Fifties suggested a symbolic break between self and society, his subsequent inward turn affirms the self as the ground of lyric poetry. MacNeice's late work should be understood as symptomatic of an encroaching dissolution of communality that would profoundly affect the cultures of both islands as the twentieth century progressed. This essay explores MacNeice's stylistic evolution at mid century and considers the extent to which these developments were an essential foundation for the creation of his remarkable late style.

Review of Andrew Davis,“Il Trittico,” “Turandot,” and Puccini’s Late Style(Indiana University Press, 2010)

[1] I imagine that most people who enjoy Puccini's operas are familiar with their moments of heightened emotional expression, in which a character sends forth an impassioned release while dramatic time is suspended. Andrew Davis examines how these moments are constructed and how they function within the context of the opera in his book "Il Trittico," "Turandot," and Puccini's Late Style. Davis posits that understanding the dialogue between passages of Romantic lyricism and more dissonant, episodic stretches in these works provides a fruitful path to interpreting drama through the music. He synthesizes a good deal of historical, musical, and dramatic information, showing that what he terms "lyric, Romantic" sections often have specific musical and formal markers, some of which refer to nineteenth-century Italian opera. These sections are especially significant because they shift away from the unmarked, modern style that characterizes much of the rest of each work. It is the withholding of lyric moments that lends them so much interpretive importance and dramatic power. Building upon much analytical and theoretical precedent, Davis makes a compelling case for basing dramatic interpretations on the strategic use of styles in these operas.[2] The introduction and first two chapters of the book establish the theoretical concepts and stylistic attributes that inform Davis's analyses. Chapter one is dedicated to surveying theoretical precedents. Carolyn Abbate's (1989) notion of the "voice-object" is central to Davis's hearings because he posits that the most lyrical, Romantic moments are the ones in which the voice-object is foregrounded and time within the world of the opera is momentarily suspended. Davis is quick to assert that the relationship among Romantic style, foregrounded voice-object, and dramatic expression is complex-there are moments in which the voice-object becomes more important, but the style may not be fully "Romantic." His analyses, though, generally promote the association by identifying passages in which these elements coincide. Further, Davis sees important connections between Abbate's understanding of the availability of "multiple voices" in music and Robert Hatten's (1994) notion of shifting levels of discourse. A principal assertion of Davis's is that an awaited, marked shift to the Romantic style in Puccini's last operas often initiates a shift in the level of discourse, and this shift has interpretive implications for the drama. Also, Hatten's application of markedness theory to musical oppositions is an important foundation for Davis's interpretations.(1) In his analyses, the non-Romantic style is unmarked because it is pervasive while the Romantic style is marked because it is strategically withheld. References to Pucinni's audiences hearing two oppositional styles in Turandot provide historical support for this understanding. Finally, Davis relates the importance of schema theory to his work. The notion that not every attribute associated with a style must be present when a style is evoked is especially important to his assertion that analogues to solita forma models are sometimes in evidence. Although Davis devotes a few pages to describing these typical formal structures from nineteenth-century Italian opera, I imagine that readers unfamiliar with them might need to supplement the information in the book with outside sources.(2) A judicious chart would have gone far in fulfilling that need.[3] The second chapter is devoted solely to defining "Romantic" aspects of musical construction. The term "Romantic" in this context does not necessarily mean "typical nineteenth-century Italian opera style"; musical characteristics perhaps not associated with that genre are included as style elements because they tend to shift the listener's focus to the singing voice.(3) Besides formal and dramatic references to the solita forma,(4) specific techniques in melody, orchestration, harmony and voice leading, and metrical attributes are all considered. …

Aspects of Harmonic Structure, Voice Leading, and Aesthetic Function in György Ligeti's in Zart Fliessender Bewegung

This essay investigates the nature and origin of the harmonic structure and canonic voice leading that appears in the closing chorale-like coda of the third piece from György Ligeti's Three Pieces for Two Pianos, ‘In zart fliessender Bewegung’, from clues found in the sketches. Extrapolating from the coda, and using additional evidence from his sketches, this essay then traces the pitch–structural relationships between the coda and the melodic fragments that emerge from the complex surface texture in the opening of Bewegung. By briefly exploring structural parallels within Ligeti's mature works, this essay suggests how the compositional approach in Bewegung serves as a bridge between his middle and late styles. This essay concludes by considering how musical meaning in Bewegung is intertwined with the intertextual relationships that exist within Ligeti's oeuvre from at least the mid-1960s to the turn of the century.

After the Opera (and the End of the World), What Now?

Following the premiere of Le Grand Macabre in 1978, György Ligeti faced a compositional crisis: how to proceed? The opera had taken him far from his compositional styles of the 1960s and early 1970s, but the way forward to the Piano Concerto he wished to compose next was not clear. In the seven years between the opera and the first book of Piano Etudes, Ligeti composed only three significant works: the Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano (1982) and two sets of songs for sixteen-part unaccompanied chorus—the Drei Phantasien nach Friedrich Hölderlin (1982) and Magyar Etüdők (1983), setting texts by Hölderlin and Sándor Weőres. This essay will examine the place of these songs, Ligeti's first settings of poetic texts since the 1950s, in the context of his works for voice, and consider their role in establishing his late style.

Friendly remainders: essays in musical criticism after Adorno

Friendly Remainders draws on Adorno's concept of the negative dialectic, examining its importance in Adorno's thought and its critical application to musical forms. Moving beyond a positivist view where musical object and appreciation operate as a synthesis, the negative dialectic method focuses on divergence and dissonance in musical forms and in society. Contradictions and divergent details and concepts become remainders, friendly because of the fresh perspective they offer on musical forms. Dineen examines these contradictory remainders in subjects such as the fascist element in Wagner's character, the torpor of Schoenberg's twelve-tone method, the self-contradiction implicit in Beethoven's Late Style, Frank Zappa's attempt to define himself as a serious composer, the reactionary stasis in Marilyn Manson's DVD Guns, God and Government World Tour, and the death motive in John Coltrane. Friendly Remainders takes seriously the project of making Adorno accessible, asking the same questions of classical and popular music - taking the measure of Mahler as much as Manson - for the value of the critical insights they provoke.

‘NO AESTHETICS OUTSIDE MY FREEDOM’

Taking as its starting point Edward Said's elaboration of the concept of Late Style in his posthumously published book of the same name, this essay examines the ‘late’ work of Said's friend, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. In particular, building on Said's perception of Adorno's late writing as embodying forms of non-reconciliation, it analyses the ways in which Darwish might be seen as a non-reconciled poet, as well as a poet of modes of non-reconciliation. Darwish's final collections of poetry both confirm and challenge the model of lateness, and this is examined through one of his last great works, the epic ‘State of Siege’, written while literally under siege by the Israeli army. Finally, the essay returns to its starting point – Said and Darwish – in its discussion of ‘a refusal to surrender’.

Queer Properties: Passion and Possession in The Spoils of Poynton

Often identified as the first work of James's celebrated late style, The Spoils of Poynton (1897) has been widely read as a "perversion" of the conventions of the realist novel; indeed, it is marked by a to describe the objects that James declared formed "the very centre" of it. This structuring absence mobilizes an atmosphere of a sexual secret in the novel, yet the eroticism that James associates with the objects and interiors that bring the novel's two arty women together has not been fully examined. In the context of James's passionate correspondence with the sculptor Hendrik Andersen and the late-nineteenth-century nexus of aestheticism and homoeroticism, the novel's exploration of possession and possessions is, this essay argues, inextricably bound up with James's attempt to represent the subject of same-sex desire in the wake of the Wilde scandal and on the cusp of James's belated friendships with gay men.

Classical Style, Childhood and Nostalgia in Mahler's Fourth Symphony

According to the critical consensus on Gustav Mahler's Fourth Symphony, Mahler seems, through both his orchestration and musical material, to be evoking both the composers who preceded him and childhood. Many scholars have claimed to hear specific allusions in the first movement to pieces composed in a classical style, and Mahler's use of simple themes with ornamented melodies in the Fourth Symphony also seems to suggest a classical style.At the same time, however, most writers hear a disparity in the movement between Mahler's nominal late romantic compositional style and his use of simpler or more naive-sounding materials. Nostalgia – defined here as a simultaneous acknowledgment of and rebellion against the irreversibility of time – offers one way of examining Mahler's juxtaposition of traits of music from the past and present. Using nostalgia as a theoretical frame, we can examine how music might be able to suggest a relation between the past and present akin to memory.In the first movement, Mahler's late romantic treatment of ‘classical’ materials seems to depict an unsuccessful attempt to recapture an idealized past, and the fourth movement‘s depiction of heaven in childlike terms set predominantly in the style of a lullaby suggests the irretrievable – perhaps even non-existent – past in which the soothing tones of a mother's voice hold the promise of calming all worry.

Myth vs. Enlightenment in Kafka's Das Schloss

Abstract Das Schloß shows many of the features commonly considered characteristic of “late style,” such as a distance from conventional narrative methods, a reliance on enigmatic forms of expression, and a prominence given to symbolic objects such as the castle of the title. However, the kind of myth-criticism that flourished in North America from roughly the 1940s to the 1960s has not produced very convincing results when applied to this text. Myth is present in Das Schloß rather as the mythic consciousness possessed by the villagers but questioned by the aggressively rational K. The novel as a whole, however, is not a rationalistic attack on religion: rather, it shows the villagers engaging in a range of religious practices and acknowledges a lingering desire for transcendence which, however, has now to be satisfied within, not beyond, everyday life. (RR)