This book examines Samuel Beckett's unique lesson in courage in the wake of humanism's postwar crisis--the courage to go on living even after experiencing life as a series of catastrophes. Rabate, a ...former president of the Samuel Beckett Society and a leading scholar of modernism, explores the whole range of Beckett's plays, novels, and essays. He places Beckett in a vital philosophical conversation that runs from Bataille to Adorno, from Kant and Sade to Badiou. At the same time, he stresses Beckett's inimitable sense of metaphysical comedy. Foregrounding Beckett's decision to write in French, Rabate inscribes him in a continental context marked by a "writing degree zero" while showing the prescience and ethical import of Beckett's tendency to subvert the "human" through the theme of the animal. Beckett's "declaration of inhuman rights," he argues, offers the funniest mode of expression available to us today.
A Handbook of Modernism Studies Rabate, Jean-Michel
2013, 2013., 2013/01/01, 2015-12-11, 2013-02-26, 20130506, Letnik:
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eBook
Featuring the latest research findings and exploring the fascinating interplay of modernist authors and intellectual luminaries, from Beckett and Kafka to Derrida and Adorno, this bold new collection ...of essays gives students a deeper grasp of key texts in modernist literature.Provides a wealth of fresh perspectives on canonical modernist texts, featuring the latest research dataAdopts an original and creative thematic approach to the subject, with concepts such as race, law, gender, class, time, and ideology forming the structure of the collectionExplores current and ongoing debates on the links between the aesthetics and praxis of authors and modernist theoreticiansReveals the profound ways in which modernist authors have influenced key thinkers, and vice versa
This article sketches a theory of modernist memory. Borges provides an entry-point for an exploration of the relation between forgetting and memory in modernism, from which I show that memory (as ...writing) would not be possible without blockages and failures of remembrance. My main contention is that absolute recall doubling as absolute forgetting in certain corpuses requires a mediation on the function of the 'heart' in modernism. This leads me to sketch a dialectics in which the heart functions as a textual machine which knots forgetting and remembrance, a circumstance which can be generalised to redefine how we understand modernism today.
Starting from a recent book on Derrida and psychoanalysis, I return to the controversy between Lacan and Derrida in the 1970s. Its focus was the letter as interpreted by Lacan in a commentary of ...Poe’s “Purloined Letter”. While agreeing with some of Derrida’s objections, I conclude that Lacan makes stronger points about the destination of the letter. I give my own example, Kafka’s “Letter to the Father” in order to argue that one can state that “a letter always reaches its destination” even if it has not been delivered.
Tackling another site for labor in 1904 Ireland, Georgina Binnie's "'Photo girl he calls her': Re-Reading Milly in Ulysses" pays attention to the social reality of a new task-force, the growing group ...of young Irish women working as technical assistants in new technologies like photography. Through Lucia and his dancer cousin (and love interest) Peggy Sinclair, Beckett was thus exposed early on to modern practices and theories of dance as Megan Girwood argues in "'Danced through its seven phases': Samuel Beckett, Symbolism, and Stage Choreographies." ...Emilie Morin in "Beckett, War Memory and the State of Exception," reminds us that Beckett's texts are infused with his political knowledge and experiences. Zooming on another type of lowered costs, Erin Smith presents Lise Jaillant's study of the connections between modernism and the popular market in Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers' Series and the Avant-Garde.
In James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism, first published in 2001, a leading scholar approaches the entire Joycean canon through the concept of 'egoism'. This concept, Jean-Michel Rabaté argues, ...runs throughout Joyce's work, and involves and incorporates its opposite, 'hospitality', a term Rabaté understands as meaning an ethical and linguistic opening to 'the other'. For Rabaté both concepts emerge from the fact that Joyce published crucial texts in the London based review The Egoist and later moved on to forge strong ties with the international Paris avant-garde. Rabaté examines the theoretical debates surrounding these connections, linking Joyce's engagement with Irish politics with the aesthetic aspects of his texts. Through egoism, he shows, Joyce defined a literary sensibility founded on negation; through hospitality, Joyce postulated the creation of a new, utopian readership. Rabaté explores Joyce's complex negotiation between these two poles in a study of interest to all Joyceans and scholars of modernism.
Derrida, quel diable d'homme ! Preux de la pensée, partant en guerre contre tous et contre lui-même, chevalier de l'idéal comme Don Quichotte et politicien pragmatique comme Sancho Pança, il n'aura ...cessé de bouleverser de fond en comble nos idées reçues pour les relancer, accroître leur vélocité et en faire des armes conceptuelles redoutables. Ce livre s'attache à suivre certaines de ses campagnes, retraçant une trajectoire qui va de son enfance et adolescence algériennes vers un avenir messianique ouvert à l'Autre. Au passage, il lui aura fallu en découdre avec un ami trop proche de certains thèmes éthiques, Emmanuel Levinas, ainsi qu'avec un ennemi plus vulnérable, Giorgio Agamben. À travers leurs méditations croisées, Derrida insiste sur le fait que la lutte polémique est préférable à la paix, car elle en fonde la possibilité tout en mettant en question les théologies guerrières. Le roman récent de J.M. Coetzee, Une enfance de Jésus, et les poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé vont servir à illustrer ces attentes et ces tensions entre chien et chat, entre futur et avenir, entre drôles de trêves et drôles de guerres : entre hospitalité et hostilité.
This article surveys the transformations and permutations of “totality” throughout the cultural and political landscapes of the twentieth century. Specifically, it explores connections between “high’ ...modernism” and totality by focusing on the heritage of this pairing as figured by major thinkers from both the Frankfurt school and structuralist and poststructuralist debates in France. Ultimately, I argue that modernism is an unfinishable archive, one that resists, and will never become, a closed totality.
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