Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies 2010

A series of seminars is to be held in Oxford on the subject of Samuel Beckett and his work. Assembled under the title 'Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies', the seminars are arranged on a weekly basis from late April to mid-June, and all are welcome to attend. There are notable contributions from Stan Gontarski, Enoch Brater and Suzanne Dow, and a range of disciplinary scholarship that encompasses psychoanalysis, philosophy, critical theory.

Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies, 2010

A seminar sponsored by the University of Oxford and the University of Northampton

Convening in the Collier Room, Regent’s Park College, Pusey Street, Oxford

Following the publication of James Knowlson's biography and the release of invaluable notebooks and diaries for scholarly scrutiny, Beckett Studies is undergoing a revolution. Beckett's major phase of intense study was in the 1920s and 30s, long before he became known as a French Existentialist after Waiting for Godot, and even longer before he was discovered by post-structuralist critics. This seminar will attempt to reassess Beckett's cultural position in two directions: by examining some of the recently uncovered influences that shaped his unique writing, and by refracting his image and his work through some of the authors, thinkers, composers and visual artists he influenced in turn.

Trinity Term 2010:

30 April
Dr Bill Prosser (Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford)
‘Samuel Beckett: Nothings in Particular’

7 May
Dr Catherine Laws (Orpheus Research Centre in Music, Ghent, Belgium)
‘Beckett's Schuberts: Vocality and Imagination’

14 May
 Dr Peter Fifield (University of York)
‘"Spirochete!" Syphilitic Fathers in Beckett and Georges Bataille’

21 May
Dr John Bolin (Linacre College, University of Oxford)
‘Watt’s Voices’

28 May 
Dr Katherine Weiss (East Tennessee State University, USA)
‘Beckett's Theatre: Revolving and Rewinding Histories’

4 June
 Dr Suzanne Dow (University of Nottingham)
‘Lacan with Beckett’

11 June
Professor Stan Gontarski (Florida State University, USA)
‘Beckett and Bergson’

18 June
Professor Enoch Brater (University of Michigan, USA)
‘Beckett's Devious Interventions, or Fun with Cube Roots’

A daylong symposium from 9am-4pm precedes this concluding session.

All welcome: seminars commence at 4.30pm. 

Download Podcasts

Download Audio Podcasts of each seminar.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Disjecta: This week's links

There are plenty of links to Samuel Beckett news and multimedia this week, including a profile of his close friend and romantic partner Barbara Bray, and articles exploring Beckett's work and the problematic tagline 'theatre of the absurd'. There's also a retrospective post on European poet Paul Celan, published by Nomadics, a piece on German critic Walter Benjamin, and news that actor Dennis Hopper is to receive an art retrospective.

Literature:

Samuel Beckett: The Telegraph profiles translator, critic and Beckett confidant Barbara Bray
Samuel Beckett: Michael Foley's Top Ten Absurd Classics
Samuel Beckett: This Space discusses Beckett's rejection of 'Absurdist' label
Samuel Beckett on holiday
Samuel Beckett: Barry Schwabsky reviews Faber's recent edition of the Collected Poems
J. G. Ballard: The Guardian's John Crace digests Ballard's Crash
Paul Celan: Nomadics profiles the distinguished Jewish poet
Marcel Proust: Collecting Proust in the new millennium
UK Literary Festivals: Event calendar

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Walter Benjamin: In Extremis

Film:

Dennis Hopper: Hollywood actor and director to receive art retrospective

Theatre:

Samuel Beckett: Radio plays Cascando and Words and Music available online
Heiner Goebbels: I Went To The House But Did Not Enter at the Barbican in London
William Shakespeare: Prefaces to Shakespeare

Etc.:

Coffee Breakdown: A new comic strip.

Thank you to all link contributors, who can be found on the
A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

Samuel Beckett rejected 'Absurdist' label

Irish writer did not associate himself with the literary and philosophical movement

Stephen Mitchelmore of This Space has posted a short statement on the problem of applying an absurdist label to the work of Samuel Beckett. It's perhaps worth noting that Martin Esslin was among the first to critically identify Beckett within such a movement in his work, Theatre of the Absurd, and aligned plays such as Endgame and Waiting for Godot with the ethical and philosophical concerns of the existentialist movement prevalent in post-war Europe. To this day, Beckett continues to be identified by many as an icon, or mascot, of the absurdist movement; but, as Mitchelmore points out, the label is a problematic and reductive one. He elaborates with words from Beckett himself, quoted from a collection of interviews:

[...] moral values are inaccessible. And they cannot be defined. In order to define them, you would have to pass judgement, which is impossible. That's why I could never agree with the notion of the theatre of the absurd. It involves a value judgment. You cannot even speak about truth. That's what's so distressful. Paradoxically, it is through form that the artist may find some kind of a way out. By giving form to formlesssness. It is only in that way, perhaps, that some underlying affirmation may be found.

Charles Juliet, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde

You can read the full text of Mitchelmore's 'Beckett and "the absurd"' at This Space.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

The Guardian's Top Ten Absurd Classics

Michael Foley lists absurd classics of the 20th Century

Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and Albert Camus all find a place in Michael Foley's top ten list of absurd classics. Here's a snippet:

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett: Kafka gave the quest saga a modern twist by having unexceptional seekers who are always frustrated – the quest story without a hero or a conclusion. Beckett took this a stage further. Godot is a quest saga without even a quest. The two tramps, thoroughly modern men, can't be bothered to embark on a quest and just wait around for meaning to come to them.

[...]

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus: This is the finest theoretical work on absurdity. Camus compares the human condition to the fate of Sisyphus, eternally condemned to push a rock up a hill, a fable that will resonate with all those obliged to work for a living. But Camus argues, convincingly, that Sisyphus can be happy with his rock. The book is short, exquisitely well-written, and full of sentences that should be on coffee mugs, T-shirts and fridge magnets everywhere.

[...]

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka: The stroke of genius here is that, when Gregor Samsa wakes up as a gigantic insect, he himself experiences only "slight annoyance". It is other people who are disgusted, especially his family. Only the old cleaning woman is unaffected, chatting familiarly to Gregor as he scuttles happily across the ceiling. [Read the article]

Michael Foley's top ten absurd classics

guardian.co.uk, 21 April 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Writers: Franz Kafka
• On Albert Camus

Heiner Goebbels: I Went To The House But Did Not Enter

A stage production inspired by Beckett, Kafka and others

The Barbican in London is hosting Heiner Goebbels' I Went To The House But Did Not Enter, 'a staged concert bringing together texts by T. S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, Maurice Blanchot and Samuel Beckett'. Music is performed live courtesy of the Hilliard Ensemble (my thanks to Stephen Mitchelmore for the link):

I Went To The House But Did Not Enter is a staged concert in three tableaux, composed by Heiner Goebbels and magnificiently performed by the world-famous Hilliard Ensemble.

The tableaux are dedicated to four key twentieth-century literary texts by T.S. Eliot, Maurice Blanchot, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. Although markedly different, each text focuses on a fragmented and anonymous protagonist, an anti-hero who embarks on a journey to everywhere and nowhere.

Through imaginative staging and a wonderfully restrained vocal presence that is strikingly different from the performance style often found on the operatic stage, the four singers bring each story vividly to life.

Barbican website

The show runs from 28 April to 1 May. Further information is available at the Barbican website.

Joyce Carol Oates: 'A Widow's Memoir'

A new collection from the novelist and critic

American novelist and critic Joyce Carol Oates to publish a memoir, following the death of her husband in 2008:

Joyce Carol Oates has published more than 50 novels, more than 30 short-story collections and an endless stream of essays and reviews—and that's not counting her novellas, plays and children's books. Now, at 71 and newly remarried, she is tackling a subject she has seldom explored in her work: herself.

Ms. Oates recently finished writing a more-than-400-page memoir detailing the aftermath of her husband Raymond Smith's death in February 2008. She describes the book, "A Widow's Memoir," as practical and darkly funny (Ms. Oates says she plans to include a "widow's handbook" with advice on fundamentals such as how to pick out a grave plot). [Read the article]

Alexandra Alter, 'Joyce Carol Oates on Joyce Carol Oates'

Wall Street Journal, 22 January 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Joyce Carol Oates on reading Nietzsche
• Ten Rules for Writing Fiction
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• Writers' Autographs

Disjecta: This week's links

This week we celebrated what would have been the 104th birthday of Irish writer Samuel Beckett. Included among the list are a selection of links to reviews, extracts and new productions of Beckett's work opening across the world. There have also been a few literary revelations in the news this week: from the uncovering of audio tapes featuring Sylvia Path and Ted Hughes in the early stages of their marriage, to the discovery of the first adult photograph of French poet Arthur Rimbaud. In addition to this, Joyce Carol Oates has announced that she is working on a memoir that deals with the death of her husband, the BFI is hosting a retrospective on Hitchcock's Psycho, and rumours abound that David Lynch will direct a sequel to Mulholland Drive.

Literature:

Happy Birthday, Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett: Richard Crary on Beckett's Letters
Samuel Beckett: An extract from his short prose work, 'Ceiling'
Samuel Beckett: An extract from early novel, Watt
Will Self at the Oxford Literary Festival, 2007
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes caught on tape
Joyce Carol Oates to write a memoir
First adult photograph of Arthur Rimbaud found
William Burroughs' 'Call Me Burroughs' Recordings
50 Best Book People to Follow on Twitter: Compiled by the Huffington Post

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Fredric Jameson: Benjamin Kunkel on Jameson's Valences of the Dialectic

Film:

David Lynch: In case you missed it: Industrial Symphony.
David Lynch: New York Magazine ponders rumours of a Mulholland Dr. sequel
Alfred Hitchcock: BFI Season of Films: Psycho: A Classic in Context
Alfred Hitchcock: Kevin Maher of The Times on the influence of Psycho
Grace Kelly: Style Icon exhibition at the V&A
Werner Herzog: The Guardian reports on 3D Cave Art Documentary

Theatre:

Samuel Beckett: A new production of Endgame in Chicago's Steppenwolf theatre

Etc.:

Cookie Crumbs: This month's links from Critical Cookie
Twitter Archive to be stored by Library of Congress

Thank you to all link contributors, who can be found on the
A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

Michael Gambon in Krapp's Last Tape

Gambon to take lead in Beckett's one-man play

Michael Colgan to direct Michael Gambon in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape at the Gate Theatre in Dublin:

Following his outstanding performance in Pinter’s No Man’s Land in 2008, Michael Gambon returns to the Gate in Beckett’s classic one-man show, Krapp’s Last Tape, for a limited number of performances. Each year on his birthday, self-absorbed Krapp records the important, and the banal, moments of the last year. As he prepares to record a new tape on his 69th birthday, he begins to listen to his archives and stumbles upon a tender memory that he recorded half a lifetime ago. This immersion in his own history leads Krapp to question with growing regret whether his present lives up to his past.

Gate Theatre, Dublin

The production opens on Thursday 28th April. For more information, visit the Gate Theatre's official website.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Michael Gambon in London production of Krapp's Last Tape

Happy birthday, Samuel Beckett

The late Irish writer Samuel Beckett would have been 104 years old today. You can find more about Beckett's life and work on the Features page: Writers: Samuel Beckett.

Samuel Beckett, Ceiling

An extract from one of Beckett's later prose texts

The opening of a short prose work by Samuel Beckett, bearing the dedication 'For Avigdor [Arikha], September 1981':

On coming to the first sight is of white. Some time after coming to the first sight is of dull white. For some time after coming to the eyes continue to. When in the end they open they are met by this dull white. Consciousness eyes to of having come to. When in the end they open they are met by this dull white. Dim consciousness eyes bidden to of having come partly to. When in the end bidden they open they are met by this dull white. Dim consciousness eyes unbidden to of having come partly to. When in the end unbidden they open they are met by this dull white. Further one cannot. [...]

Samuel Beckett, 'Ceiling'

in Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstword Ho / Stirrings Still

Edited by Dirk Van Hulle

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Disjecta: This week's links

Welcome to a bumper edition of Disjecta! I've spent the last three weeks in Los Angeles, so haven't been able to update A Piece of Monologue as much as I would have liked. But I did manage to post links on Twitter from time to time, so I've gathered together the best of them here. Included is an original piece of writing by Joyce Carol Oates, published in the New Yorker; there's an article by Richard Crary on Christopher Rick's Beckett's Dying Words; and your guide to the best literary T-shirts this spring. As if that wasn't enough, there's a selection of links related to American filmmaker David Lynch, whose Twin Peaks television series celebrated its twentieth anniversary this week.

Literature:

Paul Auster: This month's featured artist
Paul Auster: James Warner on The Music of Chance
Paul Auster: Auster on continual commissions for prefaces
Don DeLillo: Tom LeClair on DeLillo's novel, Mao II
Don DeLillo: Hermione Hoby of The Observer on Point Omega
Joyce Carol Oates: Original piece, 'I.D.' in the New Yorker
Joyce Carol Oates: Interviewed in The Paris Review
Great Novels of Waste
William Faulkner reads As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner: On Faulkner's The Wishing Tree
Writing in a Room of One's Own
Whatever happened to Modernism?
Margaret Atwood: 'You don't deke Margaret'
Margaret Atwood: On the Twittersphere
Will Self: On Self's Wilde homage, Dorian
Peter Orlovsky is Unwell
Faber & Faber Catalogue 1951
Literary T-Shirts: Spring Round-Up
William S. Burroughs: Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments
William S. Burroughs: A selection of links celebrating Naked Lunch
Samuel Beckett: On Faber's new edition of Beckett's poetry
Samuel Beckett: Richard Crary on Christopher Ricks' Beckett study
Sam Shepard: Actor and playwright's regret at never meeting Samuel Beckett
James Joyce: The enduring allure of Finnegans Wake
Paul Celan: ReadySteadyBook on Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan
50 Places to Find Literary Criticism Online

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Søren Kierkegaard: Clare Carlisle on Fear and Trembling
Judith Butler: Symposium video
Slavoj Žižek: LRB on Žižek's critiques of films he hasn't seen
Academia.edu: A social-networking site for academics

Film:

David Lynch: A new David Lynch website, Industrial Symphony
David Lynch: Interviewed on The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder in 1997
David Lynch: The official website at davidlynch.com
Paul Shrader: Taxi Driver writer donates to Harry Ransom Center
Stanley Kubrick: Playing Chess with Kubrick
Werner Herzog: A review of Herzog's Book of a Lifetime: Walking on Ice
Alfred Hitchcock: Secrets of the Psycho shower
Alfred Hitchcock: BFI celebrates 50th Anniversary of Psycho with a season of films

Television:

David Lynch: Andrew Anthony on the legacy of Twin Peaks, 20 years on
David Lynch: A History of Twin Peaks on home video

Theatre:

William Shakespeare: Lost play, Double Falsehood
William Shakespeare: Shakespeare and Wales Symposium this April
William Shakespeare: Hamlet at the MET

Etc.:

A Piece of Monologue: Interview with Design Feaster
iPadPeek: See how the iPad displays websites

Thank you to all link contributors, who can be found on the
A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

Don DeLillo on Bookstores

American novelist describes the unique atmosphere of the contemporary bookstore

In the first chapter of Don DeLillo's Mao II, a protagonist wanders the commercial ground plan of a contemporary American bookstore:

He walked among the bookstore shelves, hearing Muzak in the air. There were rows of handsome covers, prosperous and assured. He felt an excitement, hefting a new book, fitting hand over sleek spine, seeing lines of type jitter past his thumb as he let the pages fall. He was a young man, shrewd in his fervors, who knew there were books he wanted to read and others he absolutely had to own, the ones that gesture in special ways, that have a rareness or daring, a charge of heat that stains the air around them. He made a point of checking authors' photos, browsing at the south wall. He examined books stacked on tables and set in clusters near the cash terminals. He saw stacks on the floor five feet high, arranged in artful fanning patterns. There were books standing on pedestals and bunched in little gothic snuggeries. Bookstores made him slightly sick at times. He looked at the gleaming best-sellers. People drifted through the store, appearing caught in some unhappy dazzlement. There were books on step terraces and Lucite wall-shelves, books in pyramids and theme displays. He went downstairs to the paperbacks, where he stared at the covers of mass-market books, running his fingertips erotically over the raised lettering. Covers were lacquered and gilded. Books lay cradled in nine-unit counterpacks like experimental babies. He could hear them shrieking Buy me. There were posters for book weeks and book fairs. People made their way around shopping cartons, stepping over books scattered on the floor. He went to the section on modern classics and found Bill Gray's to lean novels in their latest trade editions, a matched pair banded in austere numbers and rusts. He liked to check the shelves for Bill.

Don DeLillo, Mao II

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Don DeLillo

Andrew Gibson on Samuel Beckett

George Hunka reviews Gibson's Samuel Beckett

George Hunka takes a look at Andrew Gibson's monograph, Samuel Beckett, and suggests ways of reading his work that diverge from the dominant 'comical' interpretations:

In his recent short biography of the writer, Samuel Beckett, Andrew Gibson makes the essential attempt to restore to the dramatist and his characters the difficult and thankless nobility of the compassionate view. Coming nearly fifteen years after the monumental biographies by Anthony Cronin and James Knowlson, Gibson's 200-page monograph seeks to offer something of a corrective to the academic and cultural hagiography of the writer. "It is impossible to ignore this self-deprecating, reticent, disciplined, conscientious, diligent, implacably well-mannered, dauntingly forbearing person, not least because he appears to have been the origin of the myth of 'Saint Sam' amongst a generation of scholars who made his acquaintance," Gibson writes (and bearing in mind the emphasis on the comedy, not the tragedy, that these scholars found in his work: The subtitle of Ruby Cohn's first book on Beckett was "The Comic Gamut," and Hugh Kenner included him in a study entitled The Stoic Comedians). "Look straight at the works themselves," he continues, "and there is a great deal of material that — even insisting on the detachment of writer from narrator or character — simply does not square with the myth at all: the superciliousness and arrogance perceptible in the early writings, for example; the hysterical rage of the Trilogy; the extreme and sometimes murderous forms of violence from Molloy to All That Fall to How It Is and beyond."

Gibson performs this rescue by balancing Beckett's work between what he calls melancholia ("the conviction that there is 'nothing to be done'") and misericordia (which "assumes that one cannot remain indifferent to the plight of others astray in the labyrinth"). He emphasises that this corrective is not meant to undermine Beckett's clear caritas — "goodness to others" — but to establish the difficulty of maintaining that compassion in a twentieth-century historical culture which encourages quite the opposite. In the eight chapters of his biography, Gibson traces this historical culture and Beckett's response to it in Ireland of the 1920s, Europe of the 1930s (Gibson is very good on the viciousness of fascist governments in suppressing and demonizing Modernism), postwar France, and the more international globalized culture of the Cold War and after. In doing so, Gibson draws upon recent revisionist histories of Vichy France (in which Beckett's career with the resistance formed the background to the great trilogy of novels), Mark Nixon's fine examination of Beckett's German diaries (which were discovered posthumously) over the past ten years or so, and the views of Foucault, Badiou and Adorno towards Beckett's work in an administered society. [Read the article]

George Hunka, 'Samuel Beckett: "Fuck Life"'

Superfluidities Redux, 07 April 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Writers' Rooms: Siri Hustvedt

American writer Siri Hustvedt talks about her study at home in Brooklyn, New York

A room to write in isn't like other rooms, because most of the time the person in it doesn't see it. My attention is on the page in front of me, on what the people in the book are doing or saying, and my awareness of the things near me is muted, part of the vague sensual information that comes and goes as I mull over the next sentence. I do feel the light in my room, however. My study is on the top floor of our house, which has four storeys, and the windows face south, so the sunshine streams through the panes, and even on a bleak winter day my workplace is luminous.

I usually sit down at my desk around eight o'clock in the morning and write until my brain begins to dim - around two o'clock. My morning mind is far better than the blearier one that arrives in the afternoon so I take advantage of the early hours. I have lots of reference books near me, various kinds of dictionaries - bilingual, medical and psychiatric, 34 volumes of the Grove Dictionary of Art, style manuals and handbooks, the Bible, Gray's Anatomy, some poetry anthologies, and when I'm deep in a project there are often piles of books on the floor to which I refer when needed. [Read the article]

'Writers' rooms: Siri Hustvedt'

guardian.co.uk, 26 October 2007

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers

Alain Badiou on Krapp's Last Tape

French philosopher shares his thoughts on Beckett's play

French philosopher Alain Badiou discusses the work of Samuel Beckett in relation to theatre, poetry and philosophy. (Thank you to Lee Rourke for drawing my attention to this footage.)

More at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Alain Badiou on discovering Beckett

David Lynch on Place in Film

American film director stresses the importance of location and mood in his work

In an online interview with Reverse Shot, David Lynch discusses the importance of creating a sense of place in his films. The interview also includes a discussion of Lynch's recent technological move to digital film, and his experience of making Inland Empire in DV.

Your films evoke the most tangible atmospheres of environment and place. How much of Inland Empire was influenced by settings long familiar to your work, like Hollywood and the suburban U.S., and those entirely new, like Poland?

David Lynch: I love L.A. I love the golden age of cinema, I love so many things about this town, and I also fell in love with Lodz, Poland. Little by little places start talking to you, ideas come from different experiences, they pop into your conscious mind and you’re rolling. Even if in the beginning you don’t know where you’re rolling, all that stuff, if you focus on it, will be revealed. But a sense of place, like you said, is so critical to a film. Like Billy Wilder in Sunset Boulevard—such a sense of place. Billy Wilder in The Apartment—just loved to go back to that world because of the place he creates and the characters. A sense of place with all the great ones: it’s little details, it’s mood, it’s the place, and the characters, of course. [Read the article]

Michael Joshua Rowin, 'Toy Cameras: An Interview with David Lynch'

Reverse Shot, Fall 2006

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• David Lynch on Meditation
• The Prosthetic Imagination of David Lynch
• J. G. Ballard on Blue Velvet
• Smarten up with surrealism
• David Lynch on Painting
• David Lynch's The Alphabet
• David Lynch and the Big Fish

Philip Roth: In his own words

A selection of quotes from the American novelist

As part of a Sunday Times guide to the work of Philip Roth, Steve Amidon collects a the writer's thoughts on a variety of topics:

On the reception of Portnoy’s Complaint: So many claimed to be offended by the masturbation. But that’s silly. Everybody knew about masturbation. What they were really offended by was the depiction of this level of brutality in a Jewish family.

On being Jewish-American: I know exactly what it means to be Jewish, and it’s really not interesting. I’m an American... America is first and foremost ... it’s my language. Identity labels have nothing to do with how anyone actually experiences life... I don’t accept that I write Jewish-American fiction. I don’t buy that nonsense about black literature or feminist literature. Those are labels made up to strengthen some political agenda.

On how he compares: Updike and Bellow hold their flashlights out into the world, reveal the world as it is now. I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole.

On his literary alter egos: Am I Roth or Zuckerman? It’s all me ... Nothing is me.

On his range: Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.

On work: The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

On ageing: Passion doesn’t change, but you change – you become older. The thirst for women becomes more poignant. And there is a power in the pathos of sex it didn’t have before.

On fearing death: Oblivion. Of not being alive, quite simply, of not feeling life, not smelling it. But the difference between today and when I was 12 is a kind of resignation. It no longer feels like a great injustice that I have to die. [Read the article]

Steve Amidon, 'A guide to Philip Roth'

The Sunday Times, 23 September 2007

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• The Later Work of Philip Roth
• Roth and the fate of the Great American novel
• Philip Roth on the 'Lost Cause' of Literature
• Philip Roth discusses The Humbling
• Philip Roth's Reading Habits
• Philip Roth's corrections
• Philip Roth on Kafka and the Holocaust
• Paul Auster: Why Roth is wrong about the novel
• Philip Roth/Nathan Zuckerman on cell phones
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• Writers' Autographs

Maurice Blanchot and the Limit of Disaster

An excerpt from The Writing of the Disaster

Hisaharu Motoda’s 'Neo-Ruin' of the contemporary Tokyo landscape

The opening of Maurice Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster, a fragmentary philosophical text that begins to address some of the problems and difficulties of representing or conceiving catastrophe:

The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. It does not touch anyone in particular; "I" am not threatened by it, but spared, left aside. t is in this way that I am threatened; it is in this way that the disaster threatens in me that which is exterior to me—an other than I who passively become other. There is no reaching the disaster. Out of reach is he whom is threatens, whether from afar or close up, it is impossible to say: the infiniteness of the threat has in some way broken every limit. We are on the edge of disaster without being able to situate it in the future: it is rather always already past, and yet we are on the edge or under the threat, all formulations which would imply the future—that which is yet to come—if the disaster were not that whih does not come, that which has put a stop to every arrival. To think the disaster (if this is possible, and it is not possible inasmuch as we suspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in which to think it.

Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

Translated by Ann Smock

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
• Maurice Blanchot on Kafka

Featured Artist: Paul Auster

This month's featured artist on A Piece of Monologue

American writer Paul Auster is this month's Featured Artist on A Piece of Monologue. Click here for more.