Eliot and Beckett's Low Modernism: 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. As this study suggests, 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, Eliot and Beckett's 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 senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of the Free State. He has published widely on modernism, South African fiction, and the intersection between philosophy and literature. Eliot and Beckett's Low Modernism: Humility and Humiliation is his first book. For more, visit www.rickdevilliers.com or follow him on Twitter @rick_villiers.