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- Title
At the Jamesian Altar: Commemorating Henry James's Corpus.
- Authors
Hannah, Daniel
- Abstract
In the wake of the 2016 centenary of Henry James's death, this article examines the idea of commemoration both in James's fiction and in later fictional returns to James's work. Arguing that Joyce Carol Oates's short story 'The Master at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, 1914–1916' (2008) misreads the bodily concerns of James's work, I return to James's short story 'The Altar of the Dead' (1895), noting how critics have tended to miss that tale's critique of abstraction and its perhaps surprising attention to the material and corporeal quality of commemoration. James's tale is, by this reading, a resonant meditation on what it means to remember the bodies of others. In contrast with Oates's tale, François Truffaut's film La Chambre verte (1978) and Cynthia Ozick's novel Foreign Bodies (2010) stand as fitting tributes to this neglected Jamesian strand: both these texts take up James's figuration of the altar to explore both commemorations of James and the ethical demands posed by thinking of commemoration as a corporeal engagement with otherness.
- Subjects
JAMES, Henry, 1843-1916; MASTER at St. Bartholomew's Hospital 1914-1916, The (Short story); ALTAR of the Dead, The (Short story); LA Chambre verte (Film); MEMORIAL service
- Publication
Review of English Studies, 2018, Vol 69, Issue 292, p936
- ISSN
0034-6551
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/res/hgy036