Witnessness posits a universal ethics based neither on rational mental structures nor on moral principles, but on the extra-rational powers of the imagination. Harvey pursues this ethics by staging a speculative reading of Samuel Beckett's "untranslatable" text, Worstward Ho, alongside Dante's Purgatorio and Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved and If This Be a Man. Many of the thirty concise chapters that compose Witnessness are built upon notions whose names (e.g. dimness, lessness) take inspiration from Beckett's unique and precise vocabulary....

Witnessness posits a universal ethics based neither on rational mental structures nor on moral principles, but on the extra-rational powers of the imagination. Harvey pursues this ethics by staging a speculative reading of Samuel Beckett's "untranslatable" text, Worstward Ho, alongside Dante's Purgatorio and Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved and If This Be a Man. Many of the thirty concise chapters that compose Witnessness are built upon notions whose names (e.g. dimness, lessness) take inspiration from Beckett's unique and precise vocabulary....

This collection honors the career of Donald -Sandy- Petrey, Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook for over forty years. The diversity of essays written by colleagues, friends, and former students, and ranging in subject from the traditional Festschrift theme of the honoree s compelling contributions to the study of realism and the novel s role in history, to chapters on Susan Sontag s experimental films, the thought of the late Marxist philosopher Andre Gorz, silence in the graphic novel, and linguistic disparities between American and Standard...