Middle-period Work Research Articles

On the Occasion of Terry Eagleton's Honorary Doctorate, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain


 
 
 My essay–very much in the original, tentative and exploratory sense of the word–takes retrospective stock of Terry Eagleton’s (roughly speaking) early to middle-period work across its dauntingly diverse range of topics. I focus, naturally enough, on those books that have most strongly influenced my own thinking or–as so often–pointed me in new and deeply mind-changing directions. The approach is in part anecdotal as befits a recurrent crossing of paths that has kept me reading his work with a constant sense that, whatever the shifts in my own interest, his latest book or article is likely to open up some fresh and germane line of enquiry. Nobody has done more than Terry over the past fifty years to extend the possibilities of creative inter-disciplinary exchange that opened in the late 1960s and are now being closed down with ferocious zeal by a UK in government in quest of unthinking ideological compliance. In this tribute I focus chiefly on his successive approaches to the question of ideology as it figures not only in literary and cultural theory but in daily praxis and various contexts of communal experience.
 
 

The Expanded Caesura-Fill and Transcendental States in Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata

Anticipating Beethoven's late style, his Piano Sonata Op. 106, "Hammerklavier," contains distinct passages that serve to suspend formal time (noted by numerous scholars, including Adorno, Dahlhaus, Greene, Kinderman, et al.) and disrupt the forward progress of thematic zones within a sonata form. In this essay, I tie this suspension of time to a specific formal space introduced by Hepokoski and Darcy (2006)—the "caesura-fill"—which serves as a venue for compositional exploration throughout Beethoven's sonata oeuvre. Because caesura-fill music occurs between two thematic zones (transition and secondary themes), it has the potential not only for expansion but also for establishing a state of transcendence. In part 1, I investigate the presence of expanded caesura-fill in the exposition of the "Hammerklavier", which enters a transcendental state and postpones the secondary theme zone; harmonic and textural effects in the music underscore this aesthetic. In part 2, I draw comparisons to early- and middle-period works, most significantly the Eroica Symphony, Op. 55, and the "Archduke" Piano Trio, Op. 97. Finally, in part 3, I illustrate how the exposition of the "Hammerklavier" provides a script for the development section to again enter a zone of transcendence, using sharp-side keys to postpone and ultimately undermine the recapitulation.

Schelling, esotericism and the meaning of life

Abstract F.W.J. Schelling argues in his middle period work Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom that will should be understood as the most fundamental constitutive element of reality. Though it is often downplayed in recent scholarship, Schelling derived his most central ideas for this work more or less directly from the theosophy of Jacob Boehme. I will argue that far from peripheral and antiquated curiosity, Schelling´s esoteric influences constitute the very foundation of his middle period thought. Schelling´s affinity to esotericism enabled him to develop a form of pantheism, which is not tied to the familiar problematic aspects of traditional Christian and post-Christian narratives. In mainstream Christianity, the meaning of life is dependent on the almighty God´s will, for which nature is inherently meaningless material. For Schelling, by contrast, nature itself is constitutively willing and meaningful. Consequently, owing to his esoteric influences, Schelling provides an account of the meaning of life which diverges from the dominant idea of Western philosophical and theological tradition that the meaning of life consists in a ”true world” or ”destination” beyond immanent reality.

Schelling’s pantheism and the problem of evil

ABSTRACTAny religious worldview, understood in the sense that ‘life has a purpose’, has to face the problem of evil. The problem of evil has been particularly intensively discussed in the Aristotelian–Scholastic–Christian tradition. The most popular solution has been to deny that anything truly evil actually exists. It is hard to conceive why an omnipotent and perfectly good God would allow evil to appear. Yet, Western culture has been and still is full of imagery of absolute demonic evil. I suggest that this strained dialectic could be best approached by radically rethinking the nature of evil and the theological context in which it has traditionally been thought. In his middle period works, Friedrich Schelling offers a pantheistic framework which gives extensive resources for thinking about evil. Schelling’s account is well balanced and innovative at least in two respects. It does not explain away the inscrutable presence of evil, but it neither completely renounces theoretical speculation of the origin of evil. Second, Schelling’s metaphysics anticipate Nietzsche’s fundamental critique of the ‘life-denying’ character of Western metaphysics and ethics. However, while sharing much of the critical aspects of Nietzsche’s thought, unlike Nietzsche, Schelling does not end up in atheism and moral relativism.

The Nietzschean Virtue of Authenticity: “Wie man wird, was man ist.”

In §214 of Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche asks ‘‘is there anything more beautiful than looking for one’s own virtues?’’ By inquiring into the notion of authenticity as it occurs in Nietzsche’s ethical thinking, my essay will consider this question and potential answers to it. Specifically, I will argue that in Nietzsche’s middle period works the virtue of authenticity is paramount; it is embodied by the ideal of the free spirit. Nietzsche has qualified his middle period works, Human, All Too Human, Dawn and The Gay Science, as his ganze Freigeisterei, literally: his whole free spiritedness. On the back cover of the 1 edition of The Gay Science, Nietzsche indicates that his book completes a series of works which started with Human, All Too Human. The overall goal of these works was to draw a new portrait and ideal of the free spirit. While Nietzsche will later reject this ideal as too moral, an examination of his middle period works shows that the free spirit is Nietzsche’s

Making Durkheim: A Pragmatic Genealogy of the Elementary Forms of Religious Life

In this paper I present a pragmatic genealogy of Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Drawing upon original archival sources, my aim is to explain the relatively late canonization of this work in sociology. Durkheim’s canonization occurs in the late 1960s, early 1970s around middle-period works such as Suicide or Division of Labor. As I explain here by recounting the publication history of the book from the perspective of the agents involved in its production, reception and commentary, as well as the relevant social and institutional contexts, it is only in the 1990s that the sociological community recognizes Elementary Forms as Durkheim’s central contribution to the discipline. This shift in emphasis comes explained in here by a combination of factors, some associated with a new generation of interpreters and a changing intellectual landscape more receptive to the ideas of the late Durkheim, others with the key role performed by the materiality of the work itself, namely the new editions of the 1990s. These new translations and new editions, rather than the product of antecedent causes, have themselves played a non-negligible role in transforming the meaning of the work, and of Durkheim the sociological classic.

Open Letter to Bret Davis: Letter on Egoism: Will to Power as Interpretation

Open Letter to Bret Davis: Letter on Egoism: Will to Power as Interpretation

THE MEMORY OF VIRTUE: ACHIEVING IMMORTALITY IN PLATO'S SYMPOSIUM

The prospect of human immortality is manifest in many of Plato's writings, appearing as early as the Apology (28c, 41c–d) and the Crito (54b–d), and as late as Book 12 of the Laws (967d). But nowhere is immortality given so much attention, nor as central a place in Plato's philosophical projects, as in what have traditionally been referred to as his Middle Period works, so it is hardly surprising that we find an extensive treatment of the subject of immortality in Socrates’ own encomium in the Symposium (206e–209e). Eros, Socrates tells us, is not merely a desire to possess the good, but one that pushes us towards possessing the good forever (205a, 206a) and, because of this, eros is necessarily a desire for immortality (207a). However, it is evident that Socrates’ presentation of immortality in the Symposium is fundamentally different from those found in other dialogues. This is not merely because in this work alone Socrates attributes the desire for immortality to eros; rather it is also because the nature of the immortality that Socrates recommends here, and the means by which he suggests it is achieved, are wholly unique to this work. Whereas in other dialogues Plato casts his discussions in terms of the persistence of the soul in some super-sensible realm, here he offers a picture of lovers achieving human immortality by creating memorials (μνῆμαι) that will outlast them.

Mozart's Viennese Instrumental Music: A Study of Stylistic Re-Invention (review)

Mozart's Viennese Instrumental Music: A Study of Stylistic Re-Invention. By Simon P. Keefe. Rochester, NY: Boy - dell Press, 2007. [viii, 217 p. ISBN-10 1843833190; ISBN-13 9781843833192. $80.] Music examples, references, index. Simon Keefe's engagement with Mozart's compositions of the 1780s presents a daring reappraisal of the scholarly genre of style history. Crucially, Keefe has untied the knots between climactic and their biographical position, which have formerly held together the complicated web woven from Romantic notions of biography and the idea of compositional maturity. Instead, Keefe's style history explicates in detailed analyses the intricacies of traditionally considered as mature as well as those of considered stylistic oddities, leading to a much-needed reappraisal of the latter. In doing so, Keefe grounds the notion of a stylistic development in eighteenth-century aesthetics and philosophy, by tying it on the one hand to the traditional rhetorical interest in invention and, on the other, to the rising concern with originality. In combination, these two yield an approach to style-change that considers the merits of process, not of result. It is undoubtedly Keefe's previous engagement with Mozart's piano concertos that yielded his notion of the titular stylistic reinvention, a two-fold process initiated by the composer's own arch-awareness of his compositional and aesthetic tools, which at first allows him to manipulate his own stylistic building blocks, forcing him ultimately into a reformulation of his musical language. Keefe unravels this idea most convincingly in the first section of his threefold study, in which he engages with the genre of the piano concerto. Starting with the traditionally perceived uniqueness of K. 449, Keefe understands the composition as pivotal, attributing its masterful features to newly self-conscious compositional processes that betray Mozart's awareness of the stylistic implications of specific concerto features. Here, Mozart establishes his own language of concerto style, one that is characterized by its passages of confrontational dialogue; this presents a dramatization of the concerto's traditional dialogue trope through the fast-moving opposition of forces, familiar particularly from the genre of opera buffa. Having established the attributes of his concerto style, Mozart with these in an almost topical manner in the eleven concertos between K. 450 and K. 503. Keefe's analyses of these concertos focus on a negotiation between stylistic balance and stylistic experimentation, between the rules of the game and their contortion, as Mozart engages with conventions of the concerto genre that transcend interior dialogue to comprise questions of grandeur and virtuosity. In Keefe's reading these are aesthetic, not social and performative attributes and, as such, they infiltrate Mozart's compositional constructs as conceptual elements. Rather than asking, then, how Mozart deliberates public display with compositional coherence, Keefe shows that brilliance here becomes an aesthetic rather than a technique. On this level of internalization Mozart's moments of intimacy are no longer opposed to the concerto's aesthetics of grandeur. Keefe anchors this reading of Mozart's personal style with intricate historical explanations of the concepts of grandeur and intimacy, leaving out, regrettably, a contextualization of the third element, brilliance. Ultimately, the fusion of these concepts in Mozart's middle period works is challenged in his last two concerti, K. 537 and K. 595. In Keefe's reading, the disjunction and rigidity of sectional divides, characteristic of these two concertos and formerly seen as regressive, mark the pinnacle of stylistic experimentation. Further, these concertos present Mozart's transfiguration of con - ventions into a synthesis of multifarious elements from within and without the genre. Keefe's reading, then, presents a key to understanding these works' style and meaning, thereby undermining any conception of them as late works; for Keefe's insight explains that these are not purely personal constructs that resist the audience's comprehension. …

Itinerant Atonality: Stefan Wolpe's Middle Period Work

A preliminary examination of Adorno's idea of musical material in the 1920s and 1940s prepares for a look at the tension between different types of material in middle-period Wolpe, centering on his re-deployment of the cadence. The place of the cadence was taken, in Adorno's thought, by the subjective Einfall, or ‘idea’, concealing the role of tonal and harmonic function. Just as in literature, the reference to history, after the cool objectivity of the 1920s, was felt necessary against fascism, so Wolpe's redeployment of tonal means was in part tactical. As in the historical novel's reuse of older materials, the redeployment of tonality allowed for larger, epic dimensions lost with the end of tonal forms. An element of play in Wolpe's relation to his material—including clichés, quotes, impure elements—distinguishes him from Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Hindemith. Wolpe's musical material never became as ‘indifferent’ to him as it did to them.

The Pneumatic Conception of Thought

This paper is an attempt at presenting a convincing reading of the first sentences of PI § 109, especially of its third sentence. There Wittgenstein mentions what he calls "the pneumatic conception of thought", which by Miss Anscombe is translated as "the conception of thought as a gaseous medium". By comparing the relevant sentences with their sources in Wittgenstein's manuscripts and additional parallels it is found that Anscombe's rendering is liable to be misleading. Wittgenstein's notion of "pneuma" is likely to be inspired by a conception of the kind elucidated by Oswald Spengler, for instance, according to whose account is to be understood as a sort of body (). If you take this as your central image, the pneumatic conception alluded to in PI § 109 is one which can be tracked down in Wittgenstein's early as well as in his middle-period work. In this remark (PI § 109), Wittgenstein tries to mention both helpful and misleading features of his earlier ways of thinking, and what he now calls the "pneumatic conception" can be seen to be the foil for both sorts of features. The central idea is that the core of language contains a scaffolding of rules whose ("pneumatic") substance is the same as that of our thought. In accordance with this view the logical structure of thought is held to be identical with that of language and reality—a notion which fits parts of the as well as parts of the original "grammatical" conception developed in the early 1930ies.

The complete critical guide to Robert Browning

Acknowledgments. Abbreviations and referencing. Introduction Part I - LIFE AND CONTEXTS a. The Early Years: 1812-1832 - Childhood Adolescent Rehabilitation b. The Young Writer: 1832-1846 - First Works The Theatre: a dead end? First Journeys to Italy Courtship Elizabeth Barrett c. The Italian Years: 1846-1861 - 'Italy...my University' Italy, Creativity, and Love d. Widowerhood and Old Age: 1861-1889 - Recognition at Last The 'Saturated, Sane' Public Man Interpretations. Further Reading. Part II - WORK a. Early Long Poems - Pauline Paracelsus Sordello Conclusions. Further Readings b. The Dramatic Monologue. Further Readings c. Dramatic lyrics and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics - My Last Duchess Pictor Ignotus Porphyria's Lover Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, The Bishop Orders his Tomb Count Gismond The Lost Leader. Further Reading d. Men and Women and Dramatis Personae - Poems about Art Poems of Religion Poems of Love. Further Reading e. The Ring and the Book - Basic Considerations Characters and Moral Formations Pompilia and Caponsacchi. Further Reading f. The Late Poetry - Red Cotton Night-Cap Country Ivan Ivanovitch The Parleying with Gerard de Lairesse Beatrice Signorini. Further Reading Part III - CRITICSM a. In and Out of the Canon: 1889-1979 b. Responses to the Early Long Poems - Pauline paracelsus Sordello c. The Early Monologues: A Variety of Approaches - Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister: 'Indeterminacy of Interpretation' Towards Feminist Readings of Porphyria's Lover and My Last Duchess Artist in the Marketplace-A Marxist View of Pictor Ignotus Rescuing Andromeda: Ironic and Heroic Readings of Count Gimond d. The Middle-Period Work - A Toccata of Galuppi's vs Historical Readings Historical Readings of Fra Lippo Lippi Childe Roland: Psychoanalytic vs Historical Readings The Heretic's Tragedy and the Grotesque e. The Ring and the Book: a Novel Poem. Further Reading Chronology. Bibliography. Index

Beethoven's Opus 131 and the Uncanny

A new reading of the finale of Beethoven's String Quartet in C# Minor, op. 131, taking as point of departure the theme in "doublet" form introduced in mm. 22-29. This theme recalls (or retrieves) the fugue subject of the first movement in peculiar ways, analyzed here in perhaps painstaking detail. Over the course of the movement the peculiarities dissipate; the theme recurs in different forms until, in a beautiful passage near the end, it seems less uncanny than reconciliatory, an authentic return at the end of the quartet to the ethos of the great fugue that began it. Meanwhile as the doublet theme develops and grows more expressive, the finale's "heroic" first theme decays. Yet the finale is the only movement in op. 131 to follow sonata-like procedures, strikingly evocative of the "Burnham canon" of middle-period works. Sonata-form narrative is undercut here by a counter-narrative tracing the transformations of the doublet theme, suggesting an overall cyclic rather than teleological dynamic. For Adorno, critique of the heroic ideal was at the heart of Beethoven's late style. Although Adorno did not think so, critique is more explicit in the finale of op. 131 than in many other late works, it is suggested, and more vivid, because the heroic accents of the symphonic style are evoked so deliberately within the movement itself.

Schubert's Homecoming

This article explores the metaphorical identification of the tonic key as ‘home’ in relation to the first movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata in B♭, D.960. Rejecting conventional readings whereby a ‘foreign’ or ‘alien’ element is ultimately assimilated into the ‘home’ sphere, it argues that in this movement Schubert succeeds in doing the reverse, rendering the tonic ‘unhomely’ (unheimlich; ‘uncanny’) at a critical moment in the recapitulation. Schubert's practice in this instance is contrasted with that of Beethoven in selected middle-period works; and Schubert's own fragmentary continuity draft for the movement, as well as songs from Die Winterreise and Schwanengesang, are brought to bear on the investigation of ‘home’ and ‘das Unheimliche’.

Henry James Letters, III, 1883-1895 (review)

Henry James Letters, III, 1883-1895. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge, Mass.: BeIknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1980. 579 pp. $20.00. With the publication of the third volume of Henry James's letters, we are in the midst of a temporary calm after the storm of scholarly controversy that accompanied the appearance of the first two volumes in the mid-seventies. For the general reader, there are fewer copy-editing errors and some improvement in the indexing; for the specialist, there is no further clarification forthcoming on the principles of selection and annotation. When the project is completed, the winds will rise; but at the moment we can count our blessings, for this is an interesting volume indeed. Part of the interest, of course, lies in the fact that this selection of letters and Mr. Edel's biography continue to serve as glosses upon each other. The dates and events, 1883 to 1895, are nearly identical to the third volume of the biography, The Middle Years: 1882-1895. This volume of letters is divided into four parts: "Search for an Anchorage (1883-1886)," "Italian Hours (18861887 )," "A London Life (1887-1890)," and "The Dramatic Years (1891-1895)," followed by four long previously unpublished letters from Constance Fenimore Woolson (written not long after she and James met) that Mr. Edel found catalogued among William James's correspondence. The largest number of letters in this volume are addressed to William and his wife (42), Grace Norton (22) and her brother Charles (5), Francis Boott (18) and his daughter, Elizabeth (6), Robert Louis Stevenson (20), and Edmund Gosse (18). There is a good selection of letters to William Dean Howells, Morton Fullerton, Theodore Child and seventy other separate recipients. During these dozen years there were a series of deaths and entrances. They begin as James is recovering from the deaths of his mother and his father and as he faces the departures of his brother WiIky and Turgenev. As time passes and he moves into the personal and professional crises that Edel calls James's "dramatic" years, there is the lingering illness and death of Alice James; the increasing distance from Robert Louis Stevenson, for whom he feels a special affection but who is self-exiled and dying in Samoa; the sudden, sharp grief over Lizzie Boott's unexpected death; the philosophic responses to the deaths of old friends like Mrs. Kemble and James Russell Lowell; the shock and ambivalence attendant on the gradually revealed news of Miss Woolson's presumed suicide in Florence. But, simultaneously, James was entering upon major phases of his life and art. This was the "new era" in his career (as he put it) when he produced The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima, works that reflect his self-estimate during that decade as an incurable pessimist who had no comfort for any man: "I would no more generalize than I would slide down the stairs" (p. 259). He visited with Daudet, Zola, and Goncourt in the mid-eighties, when he believed that "naturalism" had taken possession of Paris like a contagion, but, as he told Howells, they were doing the only work he respected, despite their ferocious pessimism, because it was at least serious and honest. We see James reacting contemptuously to the "critical world's" reception of The Bostonians and defensively to the charge that he had ill-used Miss Elizabeth Peabody, but more interesting are his numerous and perceptive references to the political situation in England, his increasing irritation with the EngTHE HENRY JAMES REVIEW 200 SPRING, 1982 lish upper classes (which he believed doomed), and his dark predictions on the inevitable decline of the British Empire (thirty years before the butchery of World War I). "I can imagine no spectacle more touching, more thrilling and even dramatic," he wrote Grace Norton in 1885, "than to see this great precarious artificial empire . . . struggling with forces which, perhaps, in the long run will prove too many for it" (p. 67). As he gradually withdraws from the intense social activity that characterized his "conquest" of London, and as he writes other middle-period works such as The Tragic Muse, "The Aspern Papers," "Lady Barberina," and The Reverberator...