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Article: Underdeveloped comedy - Patrick Kavanagh. (Irish poet)(A Special Issue: Contemporary Irish Poetry and Criticism)
- Article from:
- The Southern Review
- Article date:
- June 22, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 Louisiana State University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The writer of a minor literature, according to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, "feeds himself on abstinence" and tears out of language "all the qualities of underdevelopment that it has tried to hide." He tries to "make it cry with an extremely sober and rigorous cry." What these critics are defining is a place made sumptuous by destitution, in which writers "oppose the oppressed quality of a language to its oppressive quality" in the attempt to locate those points of underdevelopment at which a new kind of art becomes possible.
In these terms Samuel Beckett must stand as the pre-eminent resistance writer, as one who has always hated the languages of masters and ...