Beckett, Lacan, and the Voice

by Llewellyn Brown, Jean-Michel Rabaté (Foreword by)

Overview

The voice traverses Beckett's work in its entirety, defining its space and its structure. Emanating from an indeterminate source situated outside the narrators and characters, while permeating the very words they utter, it proves to be incessant. It can alternatively be violently intrusive, or embody a calming presence. Literary creation will be charged with transforming the mortification it inflicts into a vivifying relationship to language. In the exploration undertaken here, Lacanian psychoanalysis offers the means to approach the voice's multiple and fundamentally paradoxical facets with regards to language that founds the subject's vital relation to existence. Far from seeking to impose a rigid and purely abstract framework, this study aims to highlight the singularity and complexity of Beckett's work, and to outline a potentially vast field of investigation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783838268194
Publisher:	MANSUETO V
Publication date:	03/15/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	470
File size:	920 KB

About the Author

Llewellyn Brown is professeur agrégé and teaches French literature at the Lycée international de Saint-Germain-en-Laye. He has published Figures du mensonge littéraire: études sur l'écriture au xxe siècle (2005), L'Esthétique du pli dans l'œuvre de Henri Michaux (2007), Beckett, les fictions brèves: voir et dire (2008), Savoir de l'amour (2012). He directs the 'Samuel Beckett' series for publisher Lettres modernes Minard (Paris).

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations xix

Lacan with Beckett: Departures Jean-Michel Rabaté xxiv

Introduction and First Approaches 1

I The Voice and Its Structure 57

II Disjunction of Pronouns 117

III Continuous, Interrupted and Responses 157

IV Exteriority and Artifice 241

Singularity of the Voice: A Conclusion 383

Bibliography 395

Index 421

Editorial Reviews

Brown shows expertly how Beckett states once and for all a fundamental irrationality that will be the foundation for his entire  œuvre […].A remarkable book.

Jean-Michel Rabaté

Llewellyn Brown's study Beckett, Lacan and the Voice, unlike many ventures that throw out the baby the better to scrutinise the post-Modernist bathwater, recognises the centrality of the voice in Beckett's creation ("I hear, therefore I am"); but, equally, the way that the voice involves a jouissance that borders on the real.

Chris Ackerley

In this enthralling book, Llewellyn Brown achieves the formidable task of opening up a genuine conversation between Beckettian and Lacanian voices.

Luke Thurston