Professor Ben Hutchinson, from the Department of Modern Languages has a Commentary in this week’s Times Literary Supplement (TLS), entitled ‘A Posthumous Honour – On Lateness, Late Style and “The Old Age of the World”’.
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Anticipating his forthcoming study Lateness and Modern European Literature (Oxford University Press, 2016), Professor Hutchinson argues that late style – the term applied to works completed by artists towards the end of their lives – is as much a critical construct as a creative achievement, the secret subtext of which is invariably greatness: some artists are born late, some achieve lateness, and some have lateness thrust upon them. More broadly, he suggests that modernity as a whole can be understood not as so many manifestations of the new, but rather as an expression of historical lateness and ‘the old age of the world’.
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