1,015 research outputs found
Shane Weller, Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity
No full textAstbury Helen. Shane Weller, Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity. In: Études irlandaises, n°33 n°1, 2008. pp. 180-181
Preface
No full textMolloy is Samuel Beckett’s most celebrated novel, and his first published work to be written in French, ushering in a period of concentrated creativity in the late 1940s and early 1950s which included the companion novels Malone Dies and The Unnamable.
The tale of Molloy, old and ill, remembering and forgetting, scarcely human, begets a double plot involving the spinsterish Moran, a private detective sent to search him out, whose own deterioration during the quest shadows that of the hero.Above all, the eponymous narrator of Molloy calls into being a world and its tribulations at the end of a pencil, with finicking and irresistible certainty, while trading larger uncertainties with the reader
The Idea of Europe: A Critical History
No full textThere is an increasingly widespread sense that Europe is in crisis. Notions of a shared European identity and a common European culture appear to be losing their purchase. This crisis is often seen as a conflict between a cosmopolitan and a nationalist idea of Europe. The reality is, however, considerably more complex, as the long history of the idea of Europe reveals. In The Idea of Europe: A Critical History, Shane Weller explores that history from its origins in classical antiquity to the present day. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he demonstrates that, all too often, seemingly progressive ideas of Europe have been shaped by Eurocentric, culturally supremacist, and even racist assumptions. Seeking to break with this troubling pattern, Weller calls for an idea of Europe shaped by a spirit of self-critique and by an openness to those cultures that have for so long been dismissed as non-European
Modernist Eroticisms: European Literature after Sexology
No full textAt the heart of European literary modernism lies a concern with the erotic, and in particular with various forms of what Freud saw as 'sexual aberration', including sadism, masochism, homosexuality, fetishism and necrophilia. Modernist Eroticisms explores the impact of sexological and early psychoanalytic conceptions of sexual perversion on the representation of the erotic in modernist literature: writers whose work is discussed include Djuna Barnes, Georges Bataille, Édouard Dujardin, Hans Henny Jahnn, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Maurice Maeterlinck, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Valéry, Frank Wedekind and Oscar Wilde. Taken together, the essays in this volume explore not only the specificities of the modernist writing of the erotic, but also its decisive role in the shift from conceptions of sexual deviance to those of sexual difference
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