Beckett Samuel - Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature

Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature

Other Becketts
Edited by S. E. Gontarski

Published
Creative Involution: Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze
S. E. Gontarski

Becketts Thing: Painting and Theatre
David Lloyd

Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature
Christopher Langlois

Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature

Christopher Langlois

Per Valeria

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

Christopher Langlois, 2017

Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4744 1902 4

The right of Christopher Langlois to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

This book began its life as a doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Jonathan Boulter. I cannot overstate how instrumental he has been to the development of this book, particularly through the example of his own scholarship on Samuel Beckett. Other colleagues and mentors have contributed to and read parts of this book along the way, and they are all deserving of my sincerest thanks, but I want to especially thank Martin Kreiswirth and Andre Furlani for the time and care they have taken to read and comment on various aspects of this book ahead of its completion. It is also my pleasure to thank Stanley Gontarski for his enthusiastic support for this book.

I want also to thank Jonathan Fardy and Cosmin Toma for their company, conversation and above all their friendship. Cosmin has also read several sections of this book, and his erudite criticisms were instrumental in helping me get through some of its more intractable conceptual problems.

My warmest and deepest thanks go out to my mother, Mary Ann Langlois-Smith, for her sacrifices, her selflessness and her encouragement.

I have dedicated this book to Valeria Puntorieri, my partner and my love. Her hard work, devotion and intelligence are a daily inspiration for me, and I am simply better for having her in my life.

The time needed to research and write this book was made possible by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which funded me through Doctoral and Postdoctoral Fellowships at the University of Western Ontario and McGill University, respectively. Parts of the book have appeared in modified form in the journals Twentieth-Century Literature (Duke University Press) and College Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press), as well as in the essay collection Immanent Encounters:Literature and the Encounter with Immanence (Brill), edited by Brynnar Swenson. I thank these publishers for their permission to reprint some of this material.

In 1997 Apple computers launched an advertising campaign (in print and on television) that entreated us to Think Different, and Samuel Beckett was one of Apples icons. Avoiding Apples solecism, we might modify the appeal to say that Other Becketts is a call to think differently as well, in this case about Becketts work, to question, that is, even the questions we ask about it. Other Becketts, then, is a series of monographs focused on alternative, unexplored or under-explored approaches to the work of Samuel Beckett, not a call for novelty per se, but a call to examine afresh those of Becketts interests that were more arcane than mainstream, interests that might be deemed quirky or strange, and those of his works less thoroughly explored critically and theoretically, the late prose and drama, say, or even the poetry or criticism. Volumes might cover (but are not restricted to) any of the following: unusual illnesses or neurological disorders (the duck foot, goose foot of First Love, akathisia or the invented ducks disease or panpygoptosis of Miss Dew in Murphy, proprioception, or its disturbance, in Not I, perhaps, or other unusual neurological lapses among Becketts creatures, from Watt to the Listener of That Time); mathematical peculiarities (irrational numbers, factorials, Fibonacci numbers or sequences, or non-Euclidian approaches to geometry); linguistic failures (from Nominalism to Mauthner, say); citations of or allusions to contrarian aesthetic philosophers working in a more or less irrationalist tradition (Nietzsche, Bergson or Deleuze, among others), or in general the simple games that time plays with space. Alternative approaches would be of interest as well, with foci on objects, animals, cognitive or memory issues and the like.

S. E. Gontarski, Florida State University

Works by Samuel Beckett

Works by Maurice Blanchot

The impulse to think, to inquire, to reweave oneself ever more thoroughly, is not wonder but terror.

(Richard Rorty)

In 1991 Don DeLillo gave an interview with the New York Times