A New College Symposium: Figuring Lateness
A one day interdisciplinary Symposium organised by Professor Karen Leeder, to be
held in the McGregor Matthews Room at New College, Oxford on Monday, 30 March
2009 from 10.00 am to 6.15 pm.
Further details and registration form can be obtained by contacting Maggie
Davies (email [log in to unmask]) or tel. 01865 279552.
Professor Anne Fuchs, University College, Dublin
*Defending Lateness: or what is the ‘right time’ in cultural
memory?*
Professor Ann Jefferson, New College, Oxford
*Too late for genius*
Professor Gordon McMullan, Kings College London
*The invention of late style: Shakespeare in the discourse of
Lateness*
Professor Sam Smiles, University of Plymouth
*Recapitulation and Recension: J.M.W.Turner’s Liber
Studiorum in the 1840s*
Dr Peter Thompson, University of Sheffield
*Lateness and the Philosophy of Being and Time*
This New College Symposium will examine issues related to the idea of
‘Lateness’. Our contemporary fascination with ‘lateness’ stems from the fact
that the self- exploration prompted by aging, illness or the proximity to death
is often as deeply human as it is surprising. The privileged place that late
work occupies in the critical imagination does not only rest on its biographical
force, however, but rather on a more complex relationship between the artist or
thinker and his or her era. Equally, late thoughts do not necessarily conform to
the expectations that have developed around the myth of ‘late style’ (or
‘Spätstil’), to borrow Adorno’s term. Edward Said’s On Late Style (2006), while
challenging conventional understandings of late work, also offers a very
particular vision and leaves open many questions such as those of gender,
genius, illness, and old-age-style. Gordon McMullan’s Shakespeare and the Idea
of Late Writing. Authorship in the Proximity of Death (2007) interrogates
society’s investment in a constructed ‘discourse of lateness’ as a
transhistrical, transcultural phenomenon over time and usefully brings the idea
of art in the ‘proximity of death’ into play. This symposium will draw on these
pivotal approaches to the question of lateness but also attempt to open up
debate in new ways beyond the question of an individual’s ‘late-style’: by
exploring, for example, the relationship between the idea of lateness and
genius; lateness and gender; lateness and early death, lateness and philosophies
of time or constructions of cultural memory and the link between biographical
and epochal lateness or belatedness.
--
K.J. Leeder
Professor of Modern German Literature
Fellow and Tutor in German,
New College, Oxford
