Professor Simon Jarvis (English, University of
Cambridge, UK)
Is Art Failed Liturgy?
Ten years ago, the theologian Catherine Pickstock wrote that 'Adorno was surely wrong to invest much hope in avant-garde art since this is only a sham mode of liturgy'. This talk asks to what extent art *as such* may, especially in its relation to grief and pain, be understood as a kind of damaged or broken liturgy; and asks in what ways this would be to art's discredit or to art's credit. Starting from a discussion of Adorno's own 'Theses on Art and Religion today', the talk seeks to set Adorno correctively against Pickstock and also *vice versa*, in order to disclose and thematize the extent of their shared faith in a malign chimera: 'modernity'. These large ideas will be made to collide with the specific examples of works of verse art (by Tennyson, Wordsworth and others) and with the ways in which those works rely on an apparently perfectly trivial device in order to administer their most powerful analgesics and resuscitators: rhyme.
Simon Jarvis is Professor of English at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Robinson College. He has published among others on German philosophical aesthetics and poetics from Kant to Adorno, on Wordsworth, Pope, Keats, and Shelley, and on literary theory.
