The Aesthetics of Failure: Inexpressibility in Samuel Becketts Fiction

Although Beckett scholarship has in recent decades experienced a renaissance as a result of various poststructuralist approaches that tend to emphasize destabilization and inexpressibility as the defining features of Becketts output, relatively little attention has been paid to the ethical aspects of his aesthetics of failure. This book fits into that renaissance, but draws on a distinct, though rarely addressed, connection that Samuel Becketts work shares with that of Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas. It is within this philosophical context that the significance of Becketts aesthetics of failure becomes most visible.Becketts work can be described as one of gradual reduction and disintegration of language, a stripping away of the tools rendering expression at all possible for the sake of approaching the inexpressible. Traditional representation yields to silence and linguistic aporia; language yields to images of absence and emptiness. The primary purpose of this study is to trace this movement of unwording and analyze the role inexpressibility plays in Becketts prose in its visual, linguistic and ethical manifestations, as the aesthetics of inexpressibility is intrinsically bound with the ethical responsibility of literature understood as maintaining a relation with alterity. See more