Eliot and Beckett’s Low Modernism

The first book-length study exclusively dedicated to a comparison between T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett and the first to theorise the relation between humility and humiliation. Humility and humiliation have an awkward, often unacknowledged intimacy. Humility may be a queenly, cardinal or monkish virtue, while humiliation points to an affective state at the extreme end of shame. Yet a shared etymology links the words to lowliness and, further down, to the earth. Like the terms in question, T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett share an imperfect likeness. Between them is a common interest in states of abjection, shame and suffering - and possible responses to such states. Tracing the relation between negative affect, ethics and aesthetics, Low Modernism demonstrates how these two major modernists recuperate the affinity between humility and humiliation - concepts whose definitions have largely been determined by philosophy and theology. Rick de Villiers is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of the Free State, South Africa.