Language and Negativity in European Modernism: Toward a Literature of the Unword

This book charts the history of a distinct strain of European literary modernism that emerged out of a radical reengagement with late nineteenth-century language skepticism. Focusing ?rst on the literary and philosophical strands of this language-skeptical tradition, the book proceeds to trace the various forms of linguistic negativism deployed by European writers in the interwar and postwar years, including Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald. Through close analyses of these and other writers’ attempts to capture an “unspeakable” experience, Language and Negativity in European Modernism explores the remarkable literary attempt to deploy the negative potentialities of language to articulate an experience of what, shortly after World War II, Beckett described as a vision of “humanity in ruins.”