Beyond the Suffering of Being: Desire in Giacomo Leopardi and Samuel Beckett

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Beyond the Suffering of Being: Desire in Giacomo Leopardi and Samuel Beckett

Roberta Cauchi Santoro,

This book challenges critical approaches that argue for Giacomo Leopardi’s and Samuel Beckett’s pessimism and nihilism. Such approaches stem from the quotation of Leopardi in Beckett’s monograph Proust, as part of a discussion about the removal of desire. Nonetheless, in contrast to ataraxia as a form of ablation of desire, the desire of and for the Other is here presented as central in the two authors’ oeuvres. Desire in Leopardi and Beckett is read as lying at the cusp between the theories of Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas, a desire that splits as much as it moulds the subject when called to address the Other (inspiring what Levinas terms ‘infinity’ as opposed to ‘totality,’ an infinity pitted against the nothingness crucial to pessimist and nihilist readings).

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DOI: 10.36253/978-88-6453-406-0
Series: Studi e saggi
Scientific Board: Studi di italianistica moderna e contemporanea nel mondo anglofono / Studies in Modern and Contemporary Italianistica in the Anglophone World
Language: English
Subjects: Literature Anglo-American Literature

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© 2016 Author(s)
CC BY 4.0

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Roberta Cauchi Santoro

University of Guelph, Canada - ORCID: 0000-0002-6703-0349

Roberta Cauchi-Santoro is a lecturer at the University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada) and the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada). Since September 2013, she has been teaching European Studies and Italian Studies at the School of Languages and Literatures at the University of Guelph. In January 2015 she also started teaching at the Department of Italian and French Studies at St. Jerome’s University (University of Waterloo). She has published several articles on various aspects of Anglo-Italian literary relations.

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Publication Year: 2016
Pages: 176

eISBN: 978-88-6453-406-0
Content License: CC BY 4.0
© 2016 Author(s)

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Publication Year: 2016

eISBN: 978-88-6453-407-7
Content License: CC BY 4.0
© 2016 Author(s)

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Publication Year: 2016

eISBN: 978-88-9273-231-5
Content License: CC BY 4.0
© 2016 Author(s)

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Publication Year: 2016
Pages: 176

ISBN: 978-88-6453-405-3
Content License: CC BY 4.0
© 2016 Author(s)

Bibliographic Information

Book Title

Beyond the Suffering of Being: Desire in Giacomo Leopardi and Samuel Beckett

Authors

Roberta Cauchi Santoro

Peer Reviewed

Number of Pages

176

Publication Year

2016

Copyright Information

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/978-88-6453-406-0

ISBN Print

978-88-6453-405-3

eISBN (pdf)

978-88-6453-406-0

eISBN (epub)

978-88-6453-407-7

eISBN (xml)

978-88-9273-231-5

Series Title

Studi e saggi

Series ISSN

2704-6478

Series E-ISSN

2704-5919

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