BECKETT, LITERATURE, AND THE ETHICS OF ALTERITY

If there is one key trait common to many of the most influential post-Holocaust theories of literature, it is arguably that the literary event constitutes the affirmation of an alterity that resists all dialectical mastery and that lies at the heart of a post-metaphysical ethics. Surprising as it might seem, the works of Samuel Beckett in particular have, for all their apparent negativity, repeatedly been deployed as exemplary of just such an affirmation. In Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity, Weller reflects critically on this powerful tradition and, through an analysis of the three, interrelated topics of translation, comedy and gender in the works of Beckett and others, including Baudelaire, Bergson, Freud, Benjamin, Adorno, Blanchot, Derrida, Cixous, Kristeva and Judith Butler, he proposes a new conception of the relation between literature and alterity in what he terms its 'anethicality'.