Late Modernist Style in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas (New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century)

Beckett and Levinas are of central importance to critical debates about literary ethics. Rather than suggest the preservation of literary and ethical value in the wake of the WWII, this book argues that both launched a sustained attack on the principles of literature, weaving narrative, and descriptive doubt through phenomenology, prose, and drama. 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 Front Matter....Pages i-xvi Introduction....Pages 1-19 Front Matter....Pages 21-21 Writing against Art....Pages 23-40 A Reluctant Poetics....Pages 41-67 Front Matter....Pages 69-69 “why after all not say without further ado what can later be unsaid” (Company)....Pages 71-101 “begin again all over more or less in the same place or in another” (How It Is)....Pages 103-139 The Turn to Hyperbole....Pages 141-159 Conclusion....Pages 161-166 Back Matter....Pages 167-206 Half-Title 2 Title 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Contents 7 Series Editor’s Preface 8 Foreword 10 Acknowledgments 13 Introduction 15 Part I 34 1 Writing against Art 35 2 A Reluctant Poetics 53 Part II 80 3 “why after all not say without further ado what can later be unsaid” (Company) 81 4 “begin again all over more or less in the same place or in another” (How It Is) 112 5 The Turn to Hyperbole 149 Conclusion 168 Notes 174 Bibliography 193 Index 209