Literary Silences in Pascal, Rousseau, and Beckett »

University of Oslo

To explore literary silence is to explore the relationships between literary texts and the silence of the ineffable. Philosophical and critical accounts tend to operate with a dualistic understanding of silence as the negative other of text. This study, however, seeks to place silence within the literary text. Central to this theoretical endeavor are thinkers like Blanchot, Derrida, Gadamer and Vattimo, and the result is a fundamental challenge to our ideas of silence and text.