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14 results

  • 7 - The Unconsoled of The Unconsoled
  • from Part II - Literature, Music, and Film
  • Edited by Andrew Bennett, University of Bristol
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Published online: 16 March 2023
  • Print publication: 23 March 2023, pp 108-122
  • View extract

    Summary

    This chapter considers the formal and thematic legacy of Dostoevsky, Proust, Kafka, and Beckett on Kazuo Ishiguro’s late-modernist work. Situating Ishiguro’s lengthiest, most digressive, most formally challenging and funniest novel within the European modernist tradition, the chapter analyses its marked formal experimentation in the light of its idiosyncratic and often highly disturbing blend of humour and mishap, of comedy and adversity. The chapter proposes that The Unconsoled can be considered not only Ishiguro’s but also one of late-modernism’s great comic novels. As such, Ishiguro’s novel may be said successfully to resist the major consolation of meaning-making, parting company with narrative as a calmative and leaving behind the affirmations of consolation and solace.

  • Chapter 10 - “Que voulez-vous?”
  • from III - New Hermeneutic Codes
  • Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania
  • Book: The New Samuel Beckett Studies
  • Published online: 17 June 2019
  • Print publication: 04 July 2019, pp 175-194
  • View extract

    Summary

    In a striking letter of October 18, 1932, the twenty-six-year-old Samuel Beckett, highly uncertain about his poetry, wrote to his friend, the poet and critic Thomas McGreevy: “I’m in mourning for the integrity of a pendu’s emission of semen, what I find in Homer & Dante & Racine & sometimes Rimbaud, the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind.”. In the letter, Beckett draws a distinction between conscious, agential events (the brain knowing of grit in the wind) and reflex actions – the emission of semen in a hanged man [pendu], and the eyelids coming down without the engagement of the conscious mind.

The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature
  • The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature
  • Edited by David Hillman, Ulrika Maude
  • Published online: 05 June 2015
  • Print publication: 19 May 2015
  • View description
    This Companion offers the first systematic analysis of the representation of the body in literature. It historicizes embodiment by charting our evolving understanding of the body from the Middle Ages to the present day, and addresses such questions as sensory perception, technology, language and affect; maternal bodies, disability and the representation of ageing; eating and obesity, pain, death and dying; and racialized and posthuman bodies. This Companion also considers science and its construction of the body through disciplines such as obstetrics, sexology and neurology. Leading scholars in the field devote special attention to poetry, prose, drama and film, and chart a variety of theoretical understandings of the body.