Late Modernist Style in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas

Beckett and Levinas are of central importance to critical debates about literary ethics. Rather than suggest the presence of literary and ethical value in the wake of the Second World War, this book argues that both thinkers waged a sustained attack on the principles of literature, weaving narrative [...]
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Beckett and Levinas are of central importance to critical debates about literary ethics. Rather than suggest the presence of literary and ethical value in the wake of the Second World War, this book argues that both thinkers waged a sustained attack on the principles of literature, weaving narrative and descriptive doubt through phenomenology, prose, and drama. Peter Fifield uses conceptual and rhetorical figures shared by Beckett and Levinas - such as the face, the trace, re-commencement, hyperbole, the saying and the said - to address a wide range of texts by both authors, arguing for a Levinasian manner of reading that is distinctly non-ethical.