Dimensions
129 x 198 x 13mm
On Late Style examines the work produced by great artists - Beethoven, Thomas Mann, Jean Genet among them - at the end of their lives.
William Gay's first novel is an epic narrative of love, death, faith and violence.
Based on a hugely popular graduate seminar that Said taught in the fall of 1995 at Columbia, 'On Late Style' examines the work produced by Richard Strauss, Beethoven, Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, JeanGenet, Giuseppe Tomesi di Lampedusa, C.D. Cavafy, Samuel Beckett, Luchino Visconti, and Glenn Gould at the end of their creative lives, and illuminates the ways in which these works differed from the artists' previous works and what they tell us about the artists' evolution.
Said makes clear that rather than the resolution of a lifetime's artistic endeavour, most of the late works discussed are rife with unresolved contradiction and almost impenetrable complexity. But he helps us see how, though these works often stood in direct contrast to the tastes of society, they were, just as often, announcements of what was to come in the artists' discipline -- works of true artistic genius.
Eloquent and impassioned -- the subject had increasing resonance for the author as he battled leukaemia in the last years of his life -- brilliantly reasoned and revelatory, 'On Late Style' is Edwards Said's own great last work.
