Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett

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Northwestern University Press, 1999 - Literary Criticism - 220 pages
In recent criticism, Samuel Beckett's prose has been increasingly described as a labor of refusal: not only of what traditionally has made possible narrative and the novel but also of the major conventional suppositions concerning the primacy of consciousness, subjectivity, and expression for the artistic act. Beginning from the premise that Beckett never betrays his belief in "the impossibility to express," Saying I No More explores the Beckettian refusal. Katz posits that the expression of voicelessness in Beckett is not silence, that the negativity and negation so evident in the great writer's work are not simply affirmed, but that the valorization of abnegation, emptiness, impotence, or the "no" can all too easily become itself an affirmation of power or an inverted imposition of force.

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Contents

A Graphic Look at Becketts Whoroscopes
28
The Subject as Method Method
43
Origin Voice and Narrative in the Trilogy
71
5
95
Joyces Wake and the Texts for Nothing
125
Fabling Arrival in the Late Prose
157
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About the author (1999)

Daniel Katz has degrees from Reed College and Stanford University. He is currently Maitre de Conferences in the Department of English at the University of Paris VII.

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