Journal of Modern Literature

Abstract:

Beckett, Lacan, and the Mathematical Writing of the Real explores the essential connections between modernist literature, mathematics, and psychoanalysis through a double reading of Beckett's work through Lacan's oeuvre and vice-versa. Utilizing Lacanian key concepts and notions, Chattopadhyay deftly explains and questions them through close analyses of Beckett's works, ultimately showing how the relation between literary modernism and modern mathematics has two crucial embodiments in Beckett and Lacan. He ultimately presents us with a map of European twentieth-century thought, examining the problems of language, singularity, collectivity, sexuality, and love through two of its key figures. Proving thus the impossibility to think literary modernism without psychoanalysis (and vice-versa), Chattopadhyay leaves the readers intrigued, with a desire to further explore Beckettian analysis and Lacan's literature.