Language and Negativity in European Modernism

Description

This book charts the history of a distinct strain of European literary modernism that emerged out of a radical re-engagement with late nineteenth-century language scepticism. Focusing first on the literary and philosophical strands of this language-sceptical tradition, the book proceeds to trace the various forms of linguistic negativism deployed by European writers in the interwar and post-war years, including Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald. Through close analyses of these and other writers' attempts to capture an 'unspeakable' experience, Language and Negativity in European Modernism explores the remarkable literary attempt to deploy the negative potentialities of language in order to articulate an experience of what, shortly after the Second World War, Beckett described as a vision of 'humanity in ruins'.

Shane Weller is Professor of Comparative Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for Modern European Literature at the University of Kent, Canterbury. His publications include A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (2004), Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity (2006), Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism: The Uncanniest of Guests (2008), and Modernism and Nihilism (2011). He is also the co-author (with Dirk Van Hulle) of two volumes in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project series: The Making of Samuel Beckett's 'L'Innommable'/'The Unnamable' (2014) and The Making of Samuel Beckett's 'Fin de partie'/'Endgame' (2018).

'... this book deals with a crucial aspect of modernist literature, and the overall view it offers of this historical progression is accompanied by close and solid analysis of texts.' Forum for Modern Language Studies