Calm is a little-theorized but important link between Roland Barthes and Samuel Beckett. Beginning with Beckett, moving on to Barthes, and then interleaving the two, this paper proposes calm as a ‘scandalous’ category not reducible to kindred states like languor or apatheia. In dialogue with theorists of repose, such as Kant and De Quincey, calmness becomes less a sedated condition than an interactive process, entailing intense sensitivity to the fluctuations of what Barthes calls ‘the affective minimal’. Artistically generative, this ‘emotive lucidity’ encourages inquisitiveness towards the natural world, and enables in both writers specific writing practices — from lists to notation to haiku.
{"title":"Calm Weathers: Barthes with Beckett","authors":"Diana Leca","doi":"10.3366/para.2022.0397","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2022.0397","url":null,"abstract":"Calm is a little-theorized but important link between Roland Barthes and Samuel Beckett. Beginning with Beckett, moving on to Barthes, and then interleaving the two, this paper proposes calm as a ‘scandalous’ category not reducible to kindred states like languor or apatheia. In dialogue with theorists of repose, such as Kant and De Quincey, calmness becomes less a sedated condition than an interactive process, entailing intense sensitivity to the fluctuations of what Barthes calls ‘the affective minimal’. Artistically generative, this ‘emotive lucidity’ encourages inquisitiveness towards the natural world, and enables in both writers specific writing practices — from lists to notation to haiku.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46979744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay develops a tense relation between Samuel Beckett and Roland Barthes over their treatment of breath. If Barthes’s lovers come together through a shared breath, breaths pull Beckett’s couples apart. How then might breath bring Beckett and Barthes together, so they might be close but not too close? The essay first discards the idea of using a single understanding of breath by showing how the localized instances of breath in Beckett and Barthes do not scale up to a coherent, synthetic concept. Then, by turning to works that play with the problems of metanarrative, Beckett’s How It Is (1961–4) and Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (1977–8), it shows how breath becomes a possible means of reading these two texts together.
{"title":"Beckett, Barthes and Breath","authors":"Arthur Rose","doi":"10.3366/para.2022.0398","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2022.0398","url":null,"abstract":"This essay develops a tense relation between Samuel Beckett and Roland Barthes over their treatment of breath. If Barthes’s lovers come together through a shared breath, breaths pull Beckett’s couples apart. How then might breath bring Beckett and Barthes together, so they might be close but not too close? The essay first discards the idea of using a single understanding of breath by showing how the localized instances of breath in Beckett and Barthes do not scale up to a coherent, synthetic concept. Then, by turning to works that play with the problems of metanarrative, Beckett’s How It Is (1961–4) and Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (1977–8), it shows how breath becomes a possible means of reading these two texts together.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44397291","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article brings together Roland Barthes and Samuel Beckett into a dialogue devoid of hierarchy, with Jacques Lacan as mediator. Both writers were intent on escaping the sway of the image considered as formatted by meanings. For Barthes, the themes of love and photography point to the existence of unicity within the dispersal of meanings and the reality of loss. Rather than undoing the image like Barthes, Beckett starts from an inaugural absence of instituted reality: from an original absence of any ‘that-has-been’, as expressed in the motif of the mask. Both authors locate vision within speech, and the alterity contained within the latter.
{"title":"Barthes, Beckett and Lacan: The Image, the One and the Real","authors":"Llewellyn Brown","doi":"10.3366/para.2022.0400","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2022.0400","url":null,"abstract":"This article brings together Roland Barthes and Samuel Beckett into a dialogue devoid of hierarchy, with Jacques Lacan as mediator. Both writers were intent on escaping the sway of the image considered as formatted by meanings. For Barthes, the themes of love and photography point to the existence of unicity within the dispersal of meanings and the reality of loss. Rather than undoing the image like Barthes, Beckett starts from an inaugural absence of instituted reality: from an original absence of any ‘that-has-been’, as expressed in the motif of the mask. Both authors locate vision within speech, and the alterity contained within the latter.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49367258","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Writers, readers, critics all have strong personal preferences. Roland Barthes was a case in point. Many were the texts he chose to affirm. Others he rejected, while some were left to hover in the margins of his thinking. Still others barely feature at all, among which, conspicuous by their absence, are the novels and plays of Samuel Beckett. This article examines the political, theoretical and affective reasons for Barthes’s apparent indifference to a writer who, despite early hostility on the part of the literary establishment, came to be seen as the abiding embodiment of late modernity. It contrasts Barthes’s limited response to Beckett with that of another leading critic of the period, Maurice Blanchot.
{"title":"Critical Likes and Dislikes: Barthes, Beckett and the Resistance to Reading","authors":"L. Hill","doi":"10.3366/para.2022.0393","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2022.0393","url":null,"abstract":"Writers, readers, critics all have strong personal preferences. Roland Barthes was a case in point. Many were the texts he chose to affirm. Others he rejected, while some were left to hover in the margins of his thinking. Still others barely feature at all, among which, conspicuous by their absence, are the novels and plays of Samuel Beckett. This article examines the political, theoretical and affective reasons for Barthes’s apparent indifference to a writer who, despite early hostility on the part of the literary establishment, came to be seen as the abiding embodiment of late modernity. It contrasts Barthes’s limited response to Beckett with that of another leading critic of the period, Maurice Blanchot.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46986436","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores the world of theatre from within and beyond the stage and brings together Roland Barthes as a critic and Samuel Beckett as a playwright via a third character, the Romanian-born playwright Eugène Ionesco, who anathematized the former and admired the latter. The article starts from Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), which defined Beckett’s and Ionesco’s art, pointing out that whilst Esslin showed why their works produced ‘bewilderment’ in England and the US, he ignored the Paris debates of the 1950s to early 1960s. It then covers the intricate history of Barthes’s polemical articles on avant-garde theatre and focuses on Barthes hailing Bertolt Brecht as an innovator who redefined theatre as belonging to a community. The next section engages with Beckett’s and Ionesco’s ideas on staging and their relation to Brecht and the Brechtians. The epilogue proposes a reading of Ionesco’s satirical play Improvisation or the Shepherd’s Chameleon (1955), which features Barthes and two other representatives of nouvelle critique as characters.
{"title":"Anathematizing Barthes and Admiring Beckett with Eugène Ionesco","authors":"A. Ionescu","doi":"10.3366/para.2022.0396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2022.0396","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the world of theatre from within and beyond the stage and brings together Roland Barthes as a critic and Samuel Beckett as a playwright via a third character, the Romanian-born playwright Eugène Ionesco, who anathematized the former and admired the latter. The article starts from Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), which defined Beckett’s and Ionesco’s art, pointing out that whilst Esslin showed why their works produced ‘bewilderment’ in England and the US, he ignored the Paris debates of the 1950s to early 1960s. It then covers the intricate history of Barthes’s polemical articles on avant-garde theatre and focuses on Barthes hailing Bertolt Brecht as an innovator who redefined theatre as belonging to a community. The next section engages with Beckett’s and Ionesco’s ideas on staging and their relation to Brecht and the Brechtians. The epilogue proposes a reading of Ionesco’s satirical play Improvisation or the Shepherd’s Chameleon (1955), which features Barthes and two other representatives of nouvelle critique as characters.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46411545","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Starting from Nicholas Zurbrugg’s dismissal of the negative ‘B-Effect’ in postmodernism, which he associates with ‘Benjamin, Brecht, Beckett, Barthes, Baudrillard, and Bourdieu’, this essay examines the common rationale behind convergent affirmations of a neutrality or minimalism, often mistaken for nihilism, at key junctures in the works of Samuel Beckett and Roland Barthes, adding Maurice Blanchot as a critical link. The argument unfolds along a double axis: it first considers the formal role of ‘chatter’ or ‘idle speech’ and the fragment(ary in writing) in the three ‘B-writers’ before relating them to different constructions of temporality, such as the ‘future anterior’ and the après-coup, in their thematizations of ‘catastrophe’ and ‘disaster’ as indirect responses to personal or historical trauma and death. A brief concluding paragraph highlights how time’s suspensiveness leads to different forms of waiting across Barthes, Blanchot and Beckett.
{"title":"B Effects: Bonds of Form and Time in Barthes, Blanchot and Beckett","authors":"Laurent Milesi","doi":"10.3366/para.2022.0394","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2022.0394","url":null,"abstract":"Starting from Nicholas Zurbrugg’s dismissal of the negative ‘B-Effect’ in postmodernism, which he associates with ‘Benjamin, Brecht, Beckett, Barthes, Baudrillard, and Bourdieu’, this essay examines the common rationale behind convergent affirmations of a neutrality or minimalism, often mistaken for nihilism, at key junctures in the works of Samuel Beckett and Roland Barthes, adding Maurice Blanchot as a critical link. The argument unfolds along a double axis: it first considers the formal role of ‘chatter’ or ‘idle speech’ and the fragment(ary in writing) in the three ‘B-writers’ before relating them to different constructions of temporality, such as the ‘future anterior’ and the après-coup, in their thematizations of ‘catastrophe’ and ‘disaster’ as indirect responses to personal or historical trauma and death. A brief concluding paragraph highlights how time’s suspensiveness leads to different forms of waiting across Barthes, Blanchot and Beckett.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42251765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Françoise Bazireau, alias ‘Françoise’, the illiterate servant of the Recherche, unable to express her most intimate feelings in good French, nevertheless shows the narrator that she possesses all the codes to survive and even thrive in the Guermantes’ way. Exasperating like Albertine as a love object, she also manages, like Mme Verdurin and the Duchesse de Guermantes, the social and temporal capital of the novel. With this remarkable and underrated character, we move, as readers, from the intratextual level of the narrator — watching her from his point of view — to that of the novel itself, watching the two in a kind of love/hate duet that throws some light on the function of the ‘petit peuple’ in the Recherche.
{"title":"Françoise's Way","authors":"B. Mahuzier","doi":"10.3366/para.2022.0385","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2022.0385","url":null,"abstract":"Françoise Bazireau, alias ‘Françoise’, the illiterate servant of the Recherche, unable to express her most intimate feelings in good French, nevertheless shows the narrator that she possesses all the codes to survive and even thrive in the Guermantes’ way. Exasperating like Albertine as a love object, she also manages, like Mme Verdurin and the Duchesse de Guermantes, the social and temporal capital of the novel. With this remarkable and underrated character, we move, as readers, from the intratextual level of the narrator — watching her from his point of view — to that of the novel itself, watching the two in a kind of love/hate duet that throws some light on the function of the ‘petit peuple’ in the Recherche.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46941359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
What becomes visible when we consider À la recherche du temps perdu from the vantage point of the beach? This article contends that Proust's beach resort, Balbec, stages a reconfiguration of social ritual and corporeal style. Balbec is both an enormous casino and the ‘springboard’ for a loosely scripted, habit-disrupting social choreography. In contrast to both the aristocratic salons of Paris and the bourgeois family nucleus that characterizes Combray, Proust's beach is an improvisatory space. As such, it facilitates place-based, contingent (rather than congenital) forms of queer movement and desire.
{"title":"Proust on the Beach","authors":"hannah freed-thall","doi":"10.3366/para.2022.0388","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2022.0388","url":null,"abstract":"What becomes visible when we consider À la recherche du temps perdu from the vantage point of the beach? This article contends that Proust's beach resort, Balbec, stages a reconfiguration of social ritual and corporeal style. Balbec is both an enormous casino and the ‘springboard’ for a loosely scripted, habit-disrupting social choreography. In contrast to both the aristocratic salons of Paris and the bourgeois family nucleus that characterizes Combray, Proust's beach is an improvisatory space. As such, it facilitates place-based, contingent (rather than congenital) forms of queer movement and desire.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46512835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article attempts to think historically about the relationship between nationalism and same-sex sexuality in Proust's novel and in readers’ responses to the novel from the time of its publication to the present. The article uses a column written on the first part of Sodome et Gomorrhe by nationalist literary critic and author Binet-Valmer in 1921 in order to illuminate some of the sexual and political contexts of Proust's representation of same-sex sexuality. It then turns to two twenty-first-century uses of Proust by right-wing thinkers to theorize a particularly French, anti-communitarian, anti-politically correct form of homosexuality. Ultimately, these examples demonstrate that there is no one relationship between same-sex sexuality and nationalism or the national community; rather, same-sex sexuality often serves as a convenient tool for defining the national community and its outsiders, in a wide variety of ways that move beyond a simple equivalency between outlaw and gay.
{"title":"‘The moment is poorly chosen’: Proust, Same-Sex Sexuality and Nationalism","authors":"Tyler Blakeney","doi":"10.3366/para.2022.0384","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2022.0384","url":null,"abstract":"This article attempts to think historically about the relationship between nationalism and same-sex sexuality in Proust's novel and in readers’ responses to the novel from the time of its publication to the present. The article uses a column written on the first part of Sodome et Gomorrhe by nationalist literary critic and author Binet-Valmer in 1921 in order to illuminate some of the sexual and political contexts of Proust's representation of same-sex sexuality. It then turns to two twenty-first-century uses of Proust by right-wing thinkers to theorize a particularly French, anti-communitarian, anti-politically correct form of homosexuality. Ultimately, these examples demonstrate that there is no one relationship between same-sex sexuality and nationalism or the national community; rather, same-sex sexuality often serves as a convenient tool for defining the national community and its outsiders, in a wide variety of ways that move beyond a simple equivalency between outlaw and gay.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46798426","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The introduction to this special issue sketches out some urgent forms of intelligibility that Proust's Recherche might hold for readers in 2022 given the many crises of the present moment. Whereas Proust's novel is often read as an investigation and valorization of various forms of subjective experience, contributions to this special issue consider how aspects of the Recherche's composition might provoke us to step back and objectify subjective experience in the service of some other kind of knowledge. The introduction juxtaposes Proust's novelistic practice with Pierre Bourdieu's sociological construction of points of view. We see the social world in limited ways because we see it from a single point of view, but we can work critically to rise above those limits and envision a social field of different points of view. The introduction demonstrates how Proust's novel, like Bourdieu's sociological practice, models this form of understanding for us.
{"title":"Introduction: Proust's Modernist Sociology","authors":"Michael E. Lucey","doi":"10.3366/para.2022.0382","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2022.0382","url":null,"abstract":"The introduction to this special issue sketches out some urgent forms of intelligibility that Proust's Recherche might hold for readers in 2022 given the many crises of the present moment. Whereas Proust's novel is often read as an investigation and valorization of various forms of subjective experience, contributions to this special issue consider how aspects of the Recherche's composition might provoke us to step back and objectify subjective experience in the service of some other kind of knowledge. The introduction juxtaposes Proust's novelistic practice with Pierre Bourdieu's sociological construction of points of view. We see the social world in limited ways because we see it from a single point of view, but we can work critically to rise above those limits and envision a social field of different points of view. The introduction demonstrates how Proust's novel, like Bourdieu's sociological practice, models this form of understanding for us.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43644931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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