S. Weller, Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity

Shane WELLER, Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity

New York, Parlgrave Macmillan

2007, 232 pp.

ISBN : 9781403995810 

Publisher Comments:

If there is one trait common to almost all post-Holocaust theories of literature, it is arguably the notion that the literary event constitutes the affirmation of an alterity that resists all dialectical mastery and makes possible a post-metaphysical ethics. Beckett's oeuvre in particular has repeatedly been deployed as exemplary of just such an affirmation. In Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity, however, Weller argues through an analysis of the interrelated topics of translation, comedy, and gender that to read Beckett in this way is to miss the strangely 'anethical' nature of his work.

SHANE WELLER is a Lecturer in Comparative Literary Studies in the School of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. He is the author of A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (2005).

TABLE OF CONTENTS :

Preface 

Introduction: Literature and Alterity 

PART I: IN OTHER WORDS - ON THE ETHICS OF TRANSLATION

Translation and Difference: Dispatching Benjamin

Translation and Negation: Beckett and the Bilingual Oeuvre

PART II: THE LAUGH OF THE OTHER - ON THE ETHICS OF COMEDY

Pratfalls into Alterity: Laughter from Baudelaire to Freud and Beyond

Last Laughs: Beckett and the 'risus purus'

PART III: THE DIFFERENCE A WOMAN MAKES - ON THE ETHICS OF GENDER

Feminine Alterities: From Psychoanalysis to Gender Studies

'As If the Sex Mattered': Beckett's Degenderations * Conclusion: Beckett and the Anethical

Notes

Bibliography

Index