Synopses & Reviews
The works of contemporary émigrés in Paris, Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas, represent two of the most significant responses to the challenges of expression following the Second World War. They were both outspokenly critical of artistic and philosophical endeavour, producing writing that staked its value on the acknowledgement of its inability to express itself adequately. As such, this monograph will argue that, rather than representing a 'violently singular and personal point of view' as was suggested of Beckett in 1949, his work can be understood afresh in the light of his proximity to that of the 20th century philosopher Levinas.
Review
"When he was a war prisoner in Germany, Emmanuel Levinas was entertaining dreams of becoming a famous novelist. Fifield's fascinating study explains why, had he written the novels he was planning, they would have looked more like Beckett's texts than like Proust's: faces letting an infinite otherness shine through them, infinitesimal traces of traces, an 'otherwise than being' conveyed via a syntax of weakness made all the stronger by exaggerating its inability to say anything. Again and again, we are made to share the process of unsaying the said or unwording the word. Fifield provides a beautiful and compelling assessment of the convergence between the master of French phenomenology and the verbal genius of the Irish writer." - Jean-Michel Rabaté, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania
Synopsis
Beckett and Levinas are of central importance to critical debates about literary ethics. Rather than suggest the presence of literary and ethical value in the wake of the Second World War, this book argues that both thinkers waged a sustained attack on the principles of literature, weaving narrative and descriptive doubt through phenomenology, prose, and drama. Peter Fifield uses conceptual and rhetorical figures shared by Beckett and Levinas - such as the face, the trace, re-commencement, hyperbole, the saying and the said - to address a wide range of texts by both authors, arguing for a Levinasian manner of reading that is distinctly non-ethical.
Synopsis
Beckett and Levinas are of central importance to critical debates about literary ethics. Rather than suggest the presence of literary and ethical value in the wake of the Second World War, this book argues that both thinkers waged a sustained attack on the principles of literature, weaving narrative and descriptive doubt through phenomenology, prose, and drama. Peter Fifield uses conceptual and rhetorical figures shared by Beckett and Levinas - such as the face, the trace, re-commencement, hyperbole, the saying and the said - to address a wide range of texts by both authors, arguing for a Levinasian manner of reading that is distinctly non-ethical.
About the Author
Peter Fifield is a Junior Research Fellow at St John's College, University of Oxford, UK. He is the editor of the Samuel Beckett Society newsletter, The Beckett Circle, and was the co-editor of a special issue of Modernism/Modernity on Samuel Beckett and the archive. He is currently working on a project addressing the ills of literature in modernist writing.
Table of Contents
Introduction
PART I
1. Writing against Art
2. A Reluctant Poetics
PART II
3. "why after all not say without further ado what can later be unsaid" (Company)
4. "begin again all over more or less in the same place or in another" (How It Is)
5. The Turn to Hyperbole
Conclusion