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UNC Asheville's Spring 2013 Symposium has ended

 

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, April 24 • 11:15am - 11:35am
Humor and Self-Reflexivity in Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable

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In The Unnamable, the third novel critics refer to as the “Trilogy,” Samuel Beckett provides unprocessed, seemingly-random ideas that come from a single consciousness, one emanating from a head without body, formless yet forever lisping words. The novel invites the reader to enter a dark world and find humor out of despair and uncertainty. Beckett puts enormous responsibility on the reader and demands that the reader decipher an ironic tone and comic perspective. Such weighty responsibility often leads many Beckett readers to both frustration and to laugh at their own inability to decipher meaning. Beckett’s comical language and parody of the modern novel rejects Western literary norms. For the writer of The Unnamable, we build upon the bare-bones form and paired down language to create our own meaning. Thus, the novel is both a form that deals with knowing and how we construct meaning, with Beckett showing us that we are the ones projecting perspective and the projecting of our perspective, necessarily flawed, comic. In the end, the novel shows the way readers discern meaning and end up discovering that they themselves and the whole tradition of signification are futile, a meaningful disaster yet a disaster none the less.


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Wednesday April 24, 2013 11:15am - 11:35am EDT
Laurel Forum, Karpen Hall 137