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Lateness and Modern European Literature

Ben Hutchinson
Published in print: 2016 Published Online:

Publisher: Oxford University Press
October 2016
DOI: 10.1093/
ISBN: 9780198767695 eISBN: 9780191821578 acprof:oso/9780198767695.001.0001
Item type: book
Lateness and Modern European Literature proposes a major new reading

of modern literature understood not as that which is new, but as that
which is late. If this basic premise is strikingly simple, its consequences
are immense. Exploring the ways in which European literature repeatedly
defines itself through a sense of senescence or epigonality, the book
argues that lateness can be understood as an expression of modernitys
continuing quest for legitimacy. It explores a wide range of authorsfrom
Mary Shelley, Chateaubriand, and Immermann, via Baudelaire, Henry
James, and Nietzsche, to Valry, Djuna Barnes, and Adornocombining
close readings of their work with historical and theoretical comparisons
of the various national contexts. Out of this broad comparative sweep
emerges a taxonomy of lateness, of the diverse ways in which modern
writers can be understood, in the words of Nietzsche, as creatures facing
backwards. Ambitious and innovative, Lateness and Modern European
Literature offers a significant new model for understanding literary
modernity.
English Decadence: Late-Learning in a French School

Ben Hutchinson
in Lateness and Modern European Literature

October 2016
DOI: 10.1093/
Item type: chapter
English decadence of the latenineteenth century can be said to be doubly

epigonal, in as much as it is both about lateness and belated (following
as it does the French model). Chapter 9 enquires as to how English
writers of the 1880s and 1890s differ from their French counterpartsdo
the English decadents perceive the lateness of modernity on their own
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terms or those of the Parisians? Through three main sections, the chapter
proceeds to discuss the artificial artlessness of Walter Pater, the selfconscious minority of George Moore, and the epistemological subtleties
of Henry James celebrated late style. In doing so, it considers a range
of other related discourses including Edward Dowdens construction of
Shakespeares late style, Winckelmanns appropriation of the Platonic
category of the opsimath, and the importance of the Renaissance as a
normative model for rejuvenation.
Friedrich Nietzsche and the Latecomers of Modernity

Ben Hutchinson

October 2016
DOI: 10.1093/
Item type: chapter
In the narrative of modern European literature, Friedrich Nietzsche plays

a pivotal role in the development of a discourse of lateness. Nietzsche
relates all three termsthe modern, the European, and the literary
to the late stage of modernity; he functions as a mediator between
French and German culture, between the critique of Epigonentumand
the critique of decadence, and between the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. This chapter analyses in close detail the development of
Nietzsches thought, triangulating his conception of lateness between
his critiques of Epigonentumand decadence: in his early work of the
1870s, he condemns modernity as epigonal; in the late work of 1888, he
condemns it as decadent. That his interest in forms of lateness is in fact
considerably subtler than such an expository model can convey suggests
the importance of careful analysis of his thought as it developsthe task
undertaken by this chapter.
Fin de Sicle and No End: The Austrian Art of Being Late

Ben Hutchinson

October 2016
DOI: 10.1093/
Item type: chapter
The Wiener Moderne has long been established as a pivotal moment

in the development of modernity, and it plays an important role in the
European narrative of constructions of lateness. Chapter 11 focuses on
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how the key terms Epigonentum, Fin de sicle, and Dekadenz express
variations on lateness in the Viennese literature of the latenineteenth
century. Focusing in particular on essays and poems by figures such
as Hermann Bahr and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, as well as on cultural
criticism by the likes of Carl Spitteler, Max Nordau, and Otto Weininger,
the chapter explores the extent to which Viennese modernity is
predicated on a sense of arriving too late, after the perceived high
point of European culture. Hermann Brochs era-defining clich the Gay
Apocalypse captures the Dionysian duality at the heart of the period:
modernity is understood to be dying, but this is not necessarily a bad
thing.
Lateness as Embarrassment: Paul Valry

Ben Hutchinson

October 2016
DOI: 10.1093/
Item type: chapter
Chapter 12 begins the third Parts focus on modernist categories of

lateness by considering the concept of embarrassment. Focusing on the
thought of Paul Valry, it explores the extent to which modernity can be
said to be gn by its inheritance, a term that translates as troubled
or embarrassed but that also implies the qualities accompanying this
embarrassment: self-consciousness, inhibition, and awkwardness. If this
sentiment provides the psychological motivation behind the attempts
to make it new that characterize modernism, in Valrys thought it
emerges in two main categories: the phenomenology of lateness (the
individual emotions and thought processes that it elicits), and the
broader cultural diagnoses of modern civilization as at a late stage.
Concluding with a reading of Valrys rewriting of Faust, the chapter
suggests that aesthetic modernism constitutes an attempt to break with
the past that is at the same time contingent on an over-awareness of this
past.
Lateness as Decline: Oswald Spengler, Nicholas Berdyaev,

Helmuth Plessner, Arnold Gehlen
Ben Hutchinson

October 2016
DOI: 10.1093/
Page 3 of 6
Item type: chapter
This chapter understands lateness as a mode of decline. Tracing the

category through the cultural criticism of Oswald Spengler, Nicholas
Berdyaev, Hellmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen, it explores the
extent to which Western modernity of the 1920s is at the end of the
Late period. Playing on the German distinction between Kultur and
Zivilisation, Spengler argues that what he terms Faustian modernity
must be understood as a late, senescent civilization, rather than as
an early, vigorous culture. Berdyaev, meanwhile, sees Europe as
entering a period of senility and decayin his view an exclusively
Western European phenomenon, predicated on the after-effects of the
Renaissance. Plessner famously defines modern Germany as the belated
nation, while Gehlen analyses modernity as a Sptkultur moving towards
the end of history. In their differing ways, all these thinkers suggest the
enduring currency of historiographical theories of lateness across the
first half of the twentieth century.
Lateness as a European Language: Theodor W. Adorno and

Late Style
Ben Hutchinson

October 2016
DOI: 10.1093/
Item type: chapter
Chapter 14 concentrates on arguably the most influential twentiethcentury theorist of lateness: Theodor Adorno. Adornos views on lateness
are characteristically subtle and sophisticated, and relate in complex
ways to his views on modernity more broadly. If the relationship between
the aesthetic and late modernity forms the defining focus of his thought,
the relationship between the late aesthetic and modernity offers a
microcosm of this thought. Beginning from his seminal four-page essay
On Beethovens Late Style, the chapter proceeds to view lateness as a
red thread running throughout Adornos thought, from the early work on
late style in the 1930s to the reflections on the vexed status of culture
after the Holocaust in the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, the chapter
also considers Adornos theorization of Kafka, Beckett, and Thomas Mann
as exemplary writers of late modernity, arguing that lateness ultimately
emerges from this theorization as a truly European language.
Page 4 of 6
Lateness as Hollowing Out: Thomas Mann, Ernst Bloch,

Wyndham Lewis, D.H. Lawrence
Ben Hutchinson

October 2016
DOI: 10.1093/
Item type: chapter
If Adorno gives theoretical expression to the process of hollowing out

that characterizes modernism as that which is obsolete in modernity,
Chapter 15 traces manifestations of this process across modernist
literature. After looking back to Chateaubriand and Nietzsche, the
chapter moves forward through close readings of passages from Thomas
Manns Dr Faustus, Ernst Blochs Heritage of Our Times, T.S. Eliots
The Hollow Men, Wyndham Lewis Tarr and Men without Art, and D.H.
Lawrences letters, before returning to Paul Valrys Cahiers for a final
reading of late style as animate hollowness. If Valry sketches out
something like a via negativa of late styleunderstanding it as what
was never there, rather than what is no longer therethe category of
hollowness resonates throughout modernism; the analysis pursued in this
chapter suggests that aesthetic late style, through what Bloch terms its
sparks, can offer a constructive means of response to cultural lateness.
Lateness as Myth: T.S. Eliot, Eugne Jolas, Gottfried Benn,

Hermann Broch
Ben Hutchinson

October 2016
DOI: 10.1093/
Item type: chapter
Chapter 16 explores lateness as myth. Ernst Robert Curtius argues that

mythology is a late product; viewed in these terms, the modernist
deployment of myth can be described as symptomatic of the late
style of modernity yearning for its youth. If late style, in its critical
construction, represents an attempt to create a myth of synchrony that
transcends the obvious differences between given artists, modernism
as an aesthetic of lateness pursues the synchrony of myth. Focusing in
particular on the example of Gottfried Benn, this chapter investigates
the ways in which the late egothe title of one of Benns poems
shores fragments of mythology against its own ruin. Proceeding through
discussions of Erich Neumanns Jungian interpretation of late style and
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Hermann Brochs reading of lateness as the style of the mythical age,

the chapter argues that modernist literature can be understood as a late
homecoming to its mythical sources.
Lateness as Eschatology: Futurism, Expressionism, Decadent

Modernism
Ben Hutchinson

October 2016
DOI: 10.1093/
Item type: chapter
The final category of modernist lateness is the category of final things.

Implicit throughout all the forms of lateness explored in this study is their
evocation of mortality and finitude; pushed to its logical extreme, this
evocation finds ultimate expression in the ultimate ending. Taking its
cue from Frank Kermodes The Sense of an Ending, Chapter 17 surveys a
broad range of modernist modes of eschatology. After brief consideration
of postwar English literature of the 1920s, the chapter focuses on the
Expressionist anthology Menschheitsdmmerungthe very title of which
suggests the ambivalence that characterizes eschatological modes of
latenessbefore discussing related movements including the Futurists
and the Italian crepuscolari. The chapter then moves through texts by
Apollinaire, Yeats, and Karl Kraus, before concluding with an extended
discussion of Djuna Barnes Nightwood as an example of decadent
modernism that ultimately refuses the escape hatch of eschatology.
Page 6 of 6

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Oxford Scholarship Online

You are looking at 1-10 of 20 items for: keywords : Mayflower liteuro

Lateness and Modern European Literature

Published in print: 2016 Published Online:

Lateness and Modern European Literature proposes a major new reading

English Decadence: Late-Learning in a French School

in Lateness and Modern European Literature

English decadence of the latenineteenth century can be said to be doubly

Friedrich Nietzsche and the Latecomers of Modernity

in Lateness and Modern European Literature

In the narrative of modern European literature, Friedrich Nietzsche plays

Fin de Sicle and No End: The Austrian Art of Being Late

in Lateness and Modern European Literature

The Wiener Moderne has long been established as a pivotal moment

Lateness as Embarrassment: Paul Valry

in Lateness and Modern European Literature

Chapter 12 begins the third Parts focus on modernist categories of

Lateness as Decline: Oswald Spengler, Nicholas Berdyaev,

in Lateness and Modern European Literature

Item type: chapter

This chapter understands lateness as a mode of decline. Tracing the

Lateness as a European Language: Theodor W. Adorno and

in Lateness and Modern European Literature

Lateness as Hollowing Out: Thomas Mann, Ernst Bloch,

in Lateness and Modern European Literature

If Adorno gives theoretical expression to the process of hollowing out

Lateness as Myth: T.S. Eliot, Eugne Jolas, Gottfried Benn,

in Lateness and Modern European Literature

Chapter 16 explores lateness as myth. Ernst Robert Curtius argues that

Hermann Brochs reading of lateness as the style of the mythical age,

Lateness as Eschatology: Futurism, Expressionism, Decadent

in Lateness and Modern European Literature

The final category of modernist lateness is the category of final things.

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