Robert Harvey

Witnessness (eBook, PDF)

Beckett, Dante, Levi and the Foundations of Responsibility

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

Witnessness posits a universal ethics based neither on rational mental structures nor on moral principles, but on the extra-rational powers of the imagination. Harvey pursues this ethics by staging a speculative reading of Samuel Beckett's "untranslatable" text, Worstward Ho, alongside Dante's Purgatorio and Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved and If This Be a Man. Many of the thirty concise chapters that compose Witnessness are built upon notions whose names (e.g. dimness, lessness) take inspiration from Beckett's unique and precise vocabulary. Harvey explores the particular experience of the witness as recounted in Dante and Levi-for signs of a general, common, and innate witness-like attitude that protects the other and that we see expressed in Beckett's penultimate prose piece.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
• Seitenzahl: 176
• Erscheinungstermin: 21. Oktober 2010
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781441184153
• Artikelnr.: 48423211

Autorenporträt

Robert Harvey is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at Stony Brook University, USA. His teaching ranges from literary and film theories to modern and contemporary literatures and the interpenetrations of literary and philosophical discourse. His 2010 book published by Continuum/Bloomsbury, Witnessness: Beckett, Levi, Dante and the Foundations of Ethics appeared in French as Témoignabilité (Geneva: MetisPresses, 2015). He is a major co-editor of the OEuvres complètes of Marguerite Duras (Paris: Gallimard, 2011, 2014). Harvey was a Program Director at the Collège International de Philosophie, 2001-2007.