Profile

• Professor of Comparative Literature
• Co-Director, Centre for Modern European Literature
• Programme Director, MA in Comparative Literature
• Programme Co-Director, MA in Modern European Literature
• General Editor, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature

After studying at the universities of Oxford and Yale, I taught at Oxford before taking up a post in Comparative Literature at Kent. My teaching and research interests lie in the fields of modern European literature and literary theory. At undergraduate level, I teach the core second-year module on approaches to comparative literature, as well as modules on tragedy and film adaptations of literary works. At postgraduate level, I teach modules on the history and theory of comparative literature, autobiography, late modernism, and literature and madness, and am the programme director of the MA in Comparative Literature and co-director of the MA in Modern European Literature. My publications include books on Samuel Beckett, literature and ethics, and literature and nihilism, plus essays on a range of writers and literary theorists, including Georges Bataille, Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Franz Kafka, Wyndham Lewis, Sylvia Plath, and W. G. Sebald. I am a co-director of the Centre for Modern European Literature at the University of Kent, a member of the editorial board of the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, a member of the executive committee of the British Comparative Literature Association, and a general editor of the Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature series.

Office: CW 158
Telephone: (01227) 824716
Contact: Email

Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (accessible to University of Kent users only via this link)

Publications

My publications include the following monographs:

Modernism and Nihilism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) At the heart of some of the most influential strands of philosophical, political, and aesthetic modernism lies the conviction that modernity is fundamentally nihilistic. This book offers a wide-ranging critical history of the concept of nihilism from its origins in French Revolutionary discourse to its place in recent theorizations of the postmodern. Key moments in that history include the concept’s appropriation by political activists in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, by Nietzsche in the 1880s, by the European avant-garde and ‘high’ modernists in the early decades of the twentieth century, by conservative revolutionaries in Germany in the interwar years, and by major theorists in the post-Holocaust period. Focusing in particular on the abiding impact of Nietzsche’s claim that art is the ‘only superior counterforce’ to nihilism, I argue that an understanding of modernism (and, indeed, of postmodernism) is impossible without a reflection upon the decisive role played by the concept of nihilism therein.
Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism: The Uncanniest of Guests (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) Since Nietzsche's appropriation of the term in his later work, the concept of nihilism has played a decisive role in the thinking of both modernity and postmodernity. This book charts the deployment of that concept by some of the most influential philosophers and literary theorists of the modern period, including Heidegger, Adorno, Blanchot, Derrida, Agamben, Vattimo, and Badiou. Focusing in particular on the ways in which each of these deployments involves both a countering redetermination of nihilism and a privileging of a certain concept of the literary for what is taken to be its power of resistance to it, this book proposes neither a critique nor a revalorization of nihilism; rather, it explores through an historical, conceptual, and philological analysis the various ways in which nihilism, as what Nietzsche terms the ‘uncanniest of all guests’, returns to haunt the thought of those who would counter it.
Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) If there is one key trait common to many of the most influential post-Holocaust theories of literature, it is arguably that the literary event constitutes the affirmation of an alterity that resists all dialectical mastery and that lies at the heart of a post-metaphysical ethics. Surprising as it might seem, the works of Samuel Beckett in particular have, for all their apparent negativity, repeatedly been deployed as exemplary of just such an affirmation. In Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity, I reflect critically on this powerful tradition and, through an analysis of the three, interrelated topics of translation, comedy, and gender in the works of Beckett and others, including Baudelaire, Bergson, Freud, Benjamin, Adorno, Blanchot, Derrida, Cixous, Kristeva and Butler, I propose a new conception of the relation between literature and alterity in what I term its 'anethicality'.
A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (Legenda, 2005) Since the mid-1950s,when the works of Samuel Beckett began to attract sustained critical attention, commentators have tended either to dismiss his oeuvre as nihilist or to defend it as anti-nihilist. On the one side are figures such as Georg Lukács; on the other, some of the most influential philosophers and literary theorists of the post-war era, from Theodor Adorno to Alain Badiou. In A Taste for the Negative, I aim to call this critical tradition into question, arguing that the relationship between Beckett's texts and nihilism is one that will always be missed by those who are simply for or against Beckett.

Edited volumes include: Samuel Beckett, Molloy (Faber & Faber, 2009) Molloy (1951) is Samuel Beckett's best-known novel, and his first published work to be written in French, ushering in a period of concentrated creativity in the late 1940s which included the companion novels Malone meurt/Malone Dies (1951) and L'Innommable/The Unnamable (1953). The narrative of Molloy, old and ill, remembering and forgetting, scarcely human, begets a parallel tale of the spinsterish Moran, a private detective sent in search of him, whose own deterioration during the quest joins in with the catalogue of Molloy's woes. Molloy brings a world into existence with finicking certainties, at the tip of whoever is holding the pencil, and trades larger uncertainties with the reader. This new edition includes a corrected text, a preface, a table of dates, and an appendix containing earlier published versions of parts of Part I of the novel.

Further books and journal special issues:

• ‘Archive’ (co-edited with Ben Hutchinson), special issue of Comparative Critical Studies, 8:2–3 (2011).
• The Flesh in the Text, co-edited with Thomas Baldwin and James Fowler (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 288pp.
• Voltaire, Candide: A Dual-Language Book, a new translation with introduction and notes (New York: Dover, 2003), 176pp.

Recent articles and book chapters:

• ‘Archive Time’ (with Ben Hutchinson), Comparative Critical Studies, 8:2–3 (2011), pp. 133–53.
• ‘Beckett’s Last Chance: Les Éditions de Minuit’, in Mark Nixon (ed.), Publishing Samuel Beckett (London: British Library, 2011), pp. 111–30.
• ‘Staging Psychoanalysis: Endgame and the Freudian Theory of the Anal-Sadistic Phase’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, 22 (2010), pp. 135–47.
• ‘Dossier: Adorno’s Notes on Beckett’ (with Dirk Van Hulle), Journal of Beckett Studies, 19:2 (2010), pp. 155–216.
• ‘Unwords’, in Daniela Caselli (ed.), Beckett and Nothing: Trying to Understand Beckett (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 107–24.
• ‘Beckett and Ethics’, in S. E. Gontarski (ed.), A Companion to Samuel Beckett, Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture series (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 118–29.
• ‘The Literary Work as Purgatorial Process', Journal of Beckett Studies, 18:1–2 (September 2009), pp. 191–9.
• '"Some Experience of the Schizoid Voice": Samuel Beckett and the Language of Derangement', Forum for Modern Language Studies, 45:1 (January 2009), pp. 32–50.
• '"Orgy of false being life in common": Beckett and the Politics of Death', in Steven Barfield, Matthew Feldman, and Philip Tew (eds.), Beckett and Death (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), pp. 31–49.
• 'The Art of Indifference: Adorno's Manuscript Notes on The Unnamable', in Daniela Guardamagna and Rossana M. Sebellin (eds.), The Tragic Comedy of Samuel Beckett (Rome: Laterza, 2009), pp. 223–37.
• ‘Phenomenologies of the Nothing: Democritus, Heidegger, Beckett’, in Matthew Feldman and Ulrika Maude (eds.), Beckett and Phenomenology (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), pp. 39–55.
• ‘Beckett Among the Philosophes: The Reception of Samuel Beckett in France’, in Mark Nixon and Matthew Feldman (eds.), The International Reception of Samuel Beckett (New York and London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 24–39.
• ‘Literature and the Politics of Madness: On the Twentieth-Century Reception of Friedrich Hölderlin in France and Germany’, Comparative Critical Studies, 5:2–3 (2008), pp. 193–206.
• '"Ce mot sec et latin par surcroît": Maurice Blanchot, Literature, and Nihilism', Forum for Modern Language Studies, 44:3 (July 2008), pp. 307–21.
• '"Gnawing to be Naught": Beckett and Pre-Socratic Nihilism', Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, 20 (2008), pp. 321–33.
• ‘Not Rightly Human: Beckett and Animality’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 19 (2008), pp. 211–21.
• ‘The Anethics of Desire: Beckett, Racine, Sade’, in Russell Smith (ed.), Beckett and Ethics (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), pp. 102–17.

Further articles and book chapters:

• ‘Nietzsche Among the Modernists: The Case of Wyndham Lewis’, Modernism/Modernity, 14:4 (November 2007), pp. 625–43.
• ‘“Rather than Nothing”: Derrida, Literature, and the Resistance of Nihilism’, in Encountering Derrida: Legacies and Futures of Deconstruction, ed. Simon Morgan Wortham and Allison Weiner (New York and London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 21–32.
• ‘Beckett/Blanchot: Debts, Legacies, Affinities’, in Mark Nixon and Matthew Feldman (eds.), Beckett’s Literary Legacies (Newcastle upon Tyne: CSP, 2007), pp. 22–39.
• ‘The Politics of Body Language: The Beckett Embrace’, in Thomas Baldwin, James Fowler, and Shane Weller (eds.), The Flesh in the Text (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 141–59.
• Introduction (with Thomas Baldwin and James Fowler), in Thomas Baldwin, James Fowler, and Shane Weller (eds.), The Flesh in the Text (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 9–18.
• ‘“All the Dead Voices”: Beckett and the Ethics of Elegy’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 16:1–2 (Fall 2006/Spring 2007), pp. 85–96.
• ‘When the Other Comes Too Close: Derrida and the Threat of Affinity’, Kritikos, 3 (June 2006).
• ‘The Deaths of Poetry: Sylvia Plath and the Ethics of Modern Elegy’, Textual Practice, 20:1 (March 2006), pp. 49–69.
• Foreword to Matthew Feldman, Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’, Continuum Literary Studies series (New York and London: Continuum, 2006), pp. vii–x.
• ‘Toward the Unknotting of Watt’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 15:1–2 (Fall 2005/Spring 2006), pp. 195–203.
• ‘Last Laughs: Beckett and the Ethics of Comedy’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 15:1–2 (Fall 2005/Spring 2006), pp. 35–59.
• ‘In Other Words: On the Ethics of Translation’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 10:3 (December 2005), pp. 171–86.
• ‘Nothing to be Said: On the Inexpressible in Modern Literature and Philosophy’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 8:1 (April 2003), pp. 91–108.
• ‘The Word Folly: Samuel Beckett’s “Comment dire” (“What is the Word”)’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 5:1 (April 2000), pp. 165–80.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• CP510 The Text: Approaches to Comparative Literature
• CP518 The Book and the Film
• CP593 Tragedy

MA in Comparative Literature

• CP804 Late Modernism: Literature in Dark Times
• CP808 Writing the Self: Autobiography in the Modern Period
• CP810 Comparative Literature in Theory and Practice
• CP811 Writing Unreason: Literature and Madness in the Modern Period
• CP998 Dissertation

Research Students

I am currently supervising the following research students:

Angelos Evangelou, 'Madness in Philosophy from Nietzsche to Derrida' (PhD project)
Angelos obtained his BA (Hons) in English Language and Literature (Major) and in Philosophy (Minor) from the University of Cyprus, and his MA in Continental Philosophy from the University of Essex. His main research interests lie in the fields of modern literature, literary and critical theory, art and art theory, and continental philosophy. He is the author of 'Adorno on Genius: A Deconstructed Genius in the World of the Culture Industry', Philosophical Inquiry: International Quarterly (2007), and is now working towards his PhD at the University of Kent. The point of departure for his doctoral research lies in a course on madness and mental illness that Angelos took at the University of Essex. This course led him to consider the philosophical implications of anti-psychiatry as it tried to challenge the traditional conception of madness as something sick, abnormal and irrational. In his doctoral research, Angelos is investigating madness as a paradigm in twentieth-century continental philosophy and literary and critical theory. His principal research question are why and how the discourse of the mad came to be (re)considered, (re)evaluated and (re)valorized in the aforementioned disciplines. The focus is on Nietzsche, Bataille, Foucault and Derrida. Angelos’s doctoral research is being co-supervised by Dr Lorenzo Chiesa (French and Italian).

Melanie Foehn, 'Samuel Beckett and the Writers of Port-Royal' (PhD project)
Melanie completed her undergraduate and graduate studies in Paris, first attending a CPGE littéraire and then the Université Paris-III to study English and Spanish at Licence level. Her interest in literature and languages stems from a fourteen-year stay in English-speaking countries (mainly Britain and the US) and Argentina. She obtained a Distinction (Mention Très Bien) for both her maîtrise and Master’s dissertations on Samuel Beckett at Paris-III, exploring the metaphysical dimension of humour in the novels Murphy and Watt in relation to Shakespeare’s use of language in Hamlet (2006), and then on intertextual, thematic, and aesthetic correspondences between Beckett and Pascal, also probing the influence of Jansenism on Beckett’s writing, mainly in the trilogy (2007). She wrote a further dissertation on Beckett and Wilde while at Trinity College Dublin that same year. Her doctoral research aims at a wider analysis of the literary and philosophical impact of Port-Royal on Beckett, with the unique fusion of logic, rhetoric, and passion in Racine and Pascal, taking Arnauld and Nicole’s 1662 Logique as the philosophical backdrop, and situating Beckett’s work within the larger sphere of French literary Augustinianism. Melanie's second supervisor is Dr Thomas Baldwin (French).

Kamilla Pawlikowska, 'Reading and Writing the Face: Textual Portraiture in Russian, Polish, and English Literature in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries' (PhD project)
Kamilla graduated from Mikołaj Kopernik University in Toruń (Poland) with an MA in Sociology, and then worked as a journalist in Poland, the Czech Republic and Italy before studying at the University of Kent for a BA in English Culture and Language Studies and an AHRC-funded MA in Comparative Literature. She commenced her PhD in Comparative Literature at Kent in 2008. Her research interests are interdisciplinary in nature, focusing on: representations of the body in European literary texts of the modern period; images of the body in Polish and Russian painting; the dynamics of intra- and inter-relations between text and image; trends in modern social thought, in particular symbolic interactionism, socio-biology, ethnomethodology, and structuralism; modernity as a project, experience and representation; imagination; literary and textual surrealism; and Italian and French cinema. She currently teaches Polish language, comparative literature, and sociology, and is a member of the editorial board of the post-graduate journal Skepsi. Kamilla's doctoral research is being co-supervised by Dr Anna Katharina Schaffner (Comparative Literature).