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Literature In The Archive Of Terror: Badiou, Blanchot, Beckett, Christopher Langlois
Literature In The Archive Of Terror: Badiou, Blanchot, Beckett, Christopher Langlois
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This dissertation conjoins the two most dominant trends in the secondary criticism of Samuel Beckett today: the philosophical and historicist approaches to his work. It explores how the Reign of Terror that erupted during the French Revolution acts as a traumatic catalyst for key developments in modernist literature and continental philosophy of which the philosophical writing of Alain Badiou, the literary-critical writing of Maurice Blanchot, and the literary-narrative writing of Beckett are perhaps the most exemplary expressions. The overarching thesis that this dissertation defends is that Beckett’s post-war prose work in The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing is overshadowed by …
Agreeable Despair: Modernism And Melancholy, Derrick James Gentry
Agreeable Despair: Modernism And Melancholy, Derrick James Gentry
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This study considers a group of distinctly modernist philosophers for whom aesthetic and reflective practices represented a way out of the paralysis of a culture dominated by narrowly conceived philosophical values. These modernist philosophers, I argue, helped to give birth to mode of experimental writing that Robert Musil called "essayism." I begin in Chapter One with an account of Walter Benjamin's experimental concept of melancholy and its intersection with the avant-garde practices of French Surrealism. Chapter One begins to contrast Benjamin's concept of melancholy with Friedrich Nietzsche's therapeutic efforts to transform and overcome melancholy on both a personal and a …