The Festival of New

Lateness and Late Style” explores how and what artists create at the end of their lives, looking closely at final works, particularly those made under the pressures of terminal illness. Using the posthumous publication On Late Style by Edward Said as a central text, this class asks how artists approach mortality: do they begin to work in a new or unexpected style; do they attend to their own posterity through archiving or even re-writing their own history; or do they do both? Students will focus on Adorno’s and Said’s influential ideas of “late style,” which propose that certain artists produce their most confrontational work toward their end; examine what constitutes “late style” versus final work, and how late style can be separated from biography; and investigate the category of “lateness” as a mode of resistance to the onslaught of the present. Over the course of the semester we will consider a broad range of artists and writers, including Beethoven, Shakespeare, Willem de Kooning, Robert Morris, Barbara Hammer, Susan Sontag, and Joan Didion.