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Full Description
Reads Beckett's comic timing as part of a post-war ethics of representation
Samuel Beckett is a funny writer. He is also an author whose work is taken to respond ethically to the unspeakable seriousness of the post-Holocaust situation. How can these two statements sit together?
Ranging widely over Beckett's fiction, drama and critical writings, and including readings of Murphy, the Trilogy, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, the late prose and the late plays, this book demonstrates that it is through Beckett's comic timing that we can understand the double gesture of his art: the ethical obligation to represent the world how it is while, at the same time, opening up a space for how it ought to be.
Key Features:
Presents innovative readings of the comedy found in Beckett's fiction, drama and critical writingsSpans Beckett's entire oeuvre, using published and unpublished sourcesEngages with recent and contemporary philosophical approaches to literature, including work by Derrida, Badiou, Levinas, and AdornoMakes a unique contribution to theoretical work on comedy and laughterProvides a rigorous introduction to the theoretical debates surrounding the relationship between modernist literature and a post-war ethics of representation
Contents
Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction; Human Humour; Fun and Trembling; 'That's not moving. That's moving'; Laughing Matters; Chapter One. Critical Joking: The Early Prose; Superiority, Sarcasm, Scholarship; The Loutishness of Learning; Diminishing Laughing Returns; Art vs. Book-Keeping; S/M: Scholarship and Mimicry; Critical Timing; Chapter Two. Gagging in the Trilogy; Gagging for It; Partial Incorporation; An Obligation to Express; Tiring Desire; Toilet Training, Resistant Material; Nihil in Intellectu; Chapter Three. Power Playing in Endgame; Perhaps; Unhappiness: Nothing Funnier; Playing for Time; The Play of the Audience; Just Play; Dialectics at a Standstill; Chapter Four. Comic Tremors: The Late Prose; Embers and Ashes; Imagination at Wit's End; Ill Saying, Ill Said; Ill Seeing; Chapter Five. Slapstick Echoes: The Late Plays; Limping Gags; Deadpan Demands; 'Kindly Tune Accordingly'; 'Like Something out of Beckett'; Conclusion; Works Cited.
