Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature

Provides a sustained comparative reading of the relation between Beckett and Blanchot through its novel conception of the language and phenomenon of terror

Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature addresses the relevance of terror to understanding the violence, the suffering, and the pain experienced by the narrative voices of Beckett’s major post-1945 works in prose: The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing, How It Is, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho. Through a sustained dialogue with the theoretical work of Maurice Blanchot, it accomplishes a systematic interrogation of what happens in the space of literature when writing, and first of all Beckett’s, encounters the language of terror, thereby giving new significance - ethical, ontological, and political - to what speaks in Beckett’s texts.

Key Features

Articulates a novel conceptual framework through the language of terror for reading Beckett’s major post-1945 works in prose, all the while engaging with key thinkers in the discourse of contemporary critical theory like Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, and Alain Badiou Provides for the first time a thorough articulation of the significance of terror to Blanchot’s understanding not only of what literature is as literature, but also of the literary history of modernity that Blanchot explicitly traces from the Marquis de Sade to Samuel Beckett Affords literary studies (and Beckett and Blanchot studies specifically) a distinctive and timely voice in the veritable terror industry of scholarly research that has proliferated in the twenty-first century against the politico-historical backdrop of the War on Terror