Fragmentary Futures: Blanchot, Beckett, Coetzee

by Daniel Watt

Romanticism elaborates a model of fragmentation, different from the fragment as ruined part of a totality from which it is shorn. Rodolphe Gasché argues that the concept of the Romantic fragment would have to be 'radically recast' to be applied to contemporary literature. It is via Maurice Blanchot that the fragment is 'recast' into an event in which 'all literature is the fragment'. This book investigates that turn, exploring its implications in the work of Blanchot, Samuel Beckett and J. M. Coetzee. Blanchot's 'recast' fragment demands that literature become fragmentary whether it carries the form of the fragment or not. Beckett's prose work unfolds a part of fragmentary writing that appears to be degenerative, as words collide and syntactic structures are eroded. However, fragmentary writing allows the presentation of a damaged work, one under the threat of abandonment, as work in progress; being neither finished nor continued. The work of Coetzee demonstrates the fragment's relation to Levinasian ethics, inviting a responsiveness to the 'other': a situation that maintains the singularity of the work without reducing it to particular critical positions. The legacy of the fragment remains as much a responsibility for modern literature as for the event of the German Romantic fragment. Fragmentary Futures argues that the fragment points to an impossibility governing the generation of literature itself. The German Romantic fragment is still to come, haunting literature. The 'recast' fragment does not exorcise such a revenant but makes its future appearance more fascinating.

184 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2009