This paper presents a chapter from a work in progress provisionally titled ‘All I Am Is Feeling’: Sentiment and Sensibility in Samuel Beckett’s Post-War Writing. It seeks to establish the eighteenth-century ‘novel of sensibility’, in particular the work of Laurence Sterne, as a frame of reference for reading the corpus of work Beckett composed between 1946 and 1950, when he turned to French and to ‘writing the things I feel’. While the obvious affinities between Beckett and Sterne—plotless narrative structures, wildly digressive narrators, exuberant verbal humour, parodic displays of erudition—have often been noted, this chapter seeks to analyse the underlying basis of this affinity in the notion of sensibility. Of particular importance is the rhetorical figure of aposiopesis, in which a sentence is deliberately broken off and left unfinished, giving an impression of unwillingness or inability to continue. By these and other gestures, both Beckett and Sterne draw attention to the self-consciously theatrical (rather than performative) nature of sensibility. But behind this extreme self-reflexivity and even ironisation of feeling, however, there is an underlying commitment to sensibility, not as a retreat into the reassurances of emotional immediacy and self-presence, but as a rigorous and deeply-felt questioning of the limits of language, rationality and consciousness.

Dr Smith is a lecturer in the English Program in the School of Cultural Inquiry, RSHA.  His research interests include Samuel Beckett, literary theory, especially theories of affect, emotion & subjectivity, contemporary Australian writing, particularly concerning representations of place and space and contemporary visual art. His publications include an edited collection on the work of Samuel Beckett, Beckett and Ethics (Continuum 2009). Since 2008 he has been the co-editor of Australian Humanities Review.