Late Modernist Style in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas

212 Pages·2013·1.333 MB·English

by  Peter Fifield (auth.)

Late Modernist Style in
Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas
New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century
Series Editor: Jennifer M. Jeffers
As the leading literary figure to emerge from post–World War II Europe, Samuel Beckett’s
texts and his literary and intellectual legacy have yet to be fully appreciated by critics and
scholars. The goal of N ew Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century is to stimulate
new approaches and develop fresh perspectives on Beckett, his texts, and his legacy. The series
will provide a forum for original and interdisciplinary interpretations concerning any aspect
of Beckett’s work or his influence upon subsequent writers, artists, and thinkers.
Jennifer M. Jeffers is Professor of English and Associate Dean and Ombudsperson for the
College of Graduate Studies at Cleveland State University. In addition to numerous articles,
she is the author of The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies, and
Power; Britain Colonized: Hollywood’s Appropriation of British Literature; Uncharted Space:
The End of Narrative; the editor of Samuel Beckett ; and coeditor of Contextualizing Aesthetics:
From Plato to Lyotard .
Also in the Series:
Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive
edited by Se á n Kennedy and Katherine Weiss
Beckett’s Masculinity
by Jennifer M. Jeffers
Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work
by Paul Stewart
Late Modernist Style in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas
by Peter Fifield
Late Modernist Style in
Samuel Beckett and
Emmanuel Levinas
Peter Fifield
LATE MODERNIST STYLE IN SAMUEL BECKETT AND EMMANUEL LEVINAS
Copyright © Peter Fifield, 2013.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013
All rights reserved.
First published in 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
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registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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ISBN 978-1-349-45145-6 ISBN 978-1-137-31924-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137319241
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fifield, Peter.
Late modernist style in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas /
Peter Fifield.
p. cm.—(New interpretations of Beckett in the twenty-first century)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–1–137–29407–4
1. Beckett, Samuel, 1906–1989—Criticism and interpretation.
2. Lévinas, Emmanuel—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Modernism
(Literature) I. Title.
PR6003.E282Z653 2013
848(cid:2).91409—dc23 2012038259
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: March 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Katy
Contents
Series Editor’s Preface ix
Foreword xi
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
Part I
1 Writing against Art 23
2 A Reluctant Poetics 41
Part II
3 “why after all not say without further ado what can
later be unsaid” ( Company ) 71
4 “begin again all over more or less in the same place or
in another” (H ow It Is ) 103
5 The Turn to Hyperbole 141
Conclusion 161
Notes 167
Bibliography 1 87
Index 203
Series Editor’s Preface
A
s the leading literary figure to emerge from post–World
War II Europe, Samuel Beckett’s texts and his literary and
intellectual legacy have yet to be fully explored by critics
and scholars. The purpose of New Interpretations of Beckett in the
Twenty-First Century is to stimulate new approaches and fresh per-
spectives on Beckett’s texts and legacy. The series will provide a
forum for original and interdisciplinary interpretations concern-
ing Beckett’s work and/or his influence upon subsequent writers,
artists, and thinkers. Much has been made of James Joyce’s influ-
ence on Beckett (which is limited to the early years of his career),
but there has yet to be a thorough analysis of Beckett’s influence
not only on writers (Vaclav Havel, Edna O’Brien, Harold Pinter,
J. M. Coetzee, and James Kelman) but also on artists (Jasper Johns,
Bruce Nauman, Avigdor Arikha), musicians (Philip Glass, Heinz
Holliger, Mascual Dusapin), philosophers (Jacques Derrida, Gilles
Deleuze, and Michel Foucault), and cultural and theoretical critics
(Felix Guattari, Theodor Adorno, and Maurice Blanchot). Because
Beckett’s influence traverses disciplinary boundaries, scholarly pos-
sibilities are virtually without limit. N ew Interpretations of Beckett
will be a forum for new critical discourses on Beckett and his ongo-
ing interdisciplinary legacy.
New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century invites
work that reconnects Beckett with his own cultural and histori-
cal situation. The importance of archival access to unpublished
Beckett material, the impact of the publication of T he Letters of
Samuel Beckett, and a gestational period since the official biography
x ● Series Editor’s Preface
appeared all lead to the next phase of Beckett Studies brimming
with exciting possibilities for interpretation and evaluation. Along
with recovering from its ahistorical phase, Beckett criticism is
also beginning to open up new avenues of critique across the four
genres in which Beckett wrote (fiction, drama, poetry, critical
essay). New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century
invites scholarly proposals that feature Beckett’s work and/or his
influence or cross-discourse with other creative artists, thinkers, or
movements.
Foreword
T
he work of Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1989) has become a
touchstone for literary criticism over the past twenty years.
Its characteristic elevation of ethics to the status of “first phi-
losophy” has offered an antidote to the perceived ethical myopia of
post-structuralism, and has thus made a strong claim for philosophi-
cal readings of literature in the period of literary theory’s decline.
The price of this recognition has been a twofold neglect. The first
has been to Levinas’s hostility to literature, which has been routinely
sidestepped or forgiven as a faux pas that can be corrected by dili-
gent critics. Consulted with particular urgency as theory lost pres-
tige and authority at the end of the twentieth century, it proved an
inconvenient fact that Levinas’s opinions on literature were largely
critical. With the exception of Jill Robbins’s A ltered Reading , which
engages directly with this issue, and to which I return throughout
this book, literary criticism is still to engage properly with Levinasian
aesthetics. And it is yet to give anything like a Levinasian reading
of a literary text that takes these writings into account. The second
neglect has been to the manner in which Levinas’s works are writ-
ten, which has frequently been seen merely to provide a readymade
lexicon with which to reinvigorate tired readings. Employing those
terms that mark out Levinas’s writing discussion of the face, alterity,
and the other would thus bear the hopes of critics seeking an ethi-
cally responsive, or even responsible, criticism. Careful attention to
the development and deployment of these terms will remedy this.
R eading Levinas in tandem with Samuel Beckett allows us to
take proper stock of both of these elements of what we might call