Aesthetics at its end: Late style in the works of Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, and W. G. Sebald

This dissertation argues that the concept of late style provides a model for reading the works of three twentieth-century European exiles: Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, and W. G. Sebald. Viewing lateness as a determining feature of exilic writing, the dissertation proposes that, within the context of literary modernity, the late style emerges out of each writer's self-conscious attempts at negotiating the contested terms of his own linguistic, aesthetic, and cultural belatedness. Each writer's peculiarly untimely, age-transcending aesthetic is reworked through a subtle shift in literary sensibility, a different idiom for the late stage of writing, involving also discontent with a personal (and more general) literary past, or, as in Sebald's case, belatedness to history itself. Because late style, by its nature, always brings time in its wake, its dominant mode is retrospective and self-revisionary: paradox, tension, irresolution, and subtly placed hints of its own failure gesture towards style at its end.;Chapter I considers Conrad's Under Western Eyes: his late return, through a revision of Dostoevsky (the writer he most complexly hated), to themes and preoccupations from his personal past. Conrad's rewriting of Dostoevsky, a groundbreaking moment within novelistic modernity, enacts a deeply mediated gesture of self-revisionism that defines the peculiar paradox of Conrad's late style. Chapter II argues for Nabokov's double self-placement, above exile and loss, time and aging, but with a diversion from this aloofness in the minor late work, Transparent Things. Late style here emerges as an uncharacteristic revision of earlier work and as an even less typical critique by Nabokov of pure writing. Chapter III presents W. G. Sebald's works, The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn, as an ultimate vision and aesthetic of lateness. Where writing engenders itself so intensely in the condition of its own aesthetic, cultural, and historical belatedness, figurations of a whole epoch's decline feature prominently. Sebald's prose, perpetually revising itself for approximations of the history that inevitably escapes it, brings the novel to a fragmented, deeply riven aesthetics of its end.