Wednesday, 5 May 2021, 7.30 pm, ICI Berlin, online
Lecture by
Amy Hollywood
Many characters die twice in the nineteenth-century British and American novel, with protracted and repeated death scenes marking the profundity and inescapability of death, its communal nature, and the deep sentimentality associated with the loss of a beloved other. In Wings of the Dove (1902), Henry James repeats the trope of doubled death, but with a radical difference. His heroine, Milly Theale, initially stages her own death to represent less a death than an assumption, one James directly models on Swedenborgian accounts of the transformation of the human into an angel. That Milly dies again, although with an audience of one, suggests the complexity of James’ relationship to this Swedenborgian scene, one he comes to through the legacy of his father’s writings and an early novella by Honoré de Balzac, the enigmatic Séraphîta. But what happens when communal forms shape a quintessentially modern novel? To what extent is community expelled? Or is it, instead, transformed into a community of readers?
To register for the online event, please visit https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/amy-hollywood/.