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Late Modernist Style in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas PDF

212 Pages·2013·1.333 MB·English
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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® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. 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

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