SHANE WELLER is a Lecturer in Comparative Literary Studies in the School of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. He is the author of A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (2005).

Preface Introduction: Literature and Alterity PART I: IN OTHER WORDS - ON THE ETHICS OF TRANSLATION Translation and Difference: Dispatching Benjamin Translation and Negation: Beckett and the Bilingual Oeuvre PART II: THE LAUGH OF THE OTHER - ON THE ETHICS OF COMEDY Pratfalls into Alterity: Laughter from Baudelaire to Freud and Beyond Last Laughs: Beckett and the ' risus purus ' PART III: THE DIFFERENCE A WOMAN MAKES - ON THE ETHICS OF GENDER Feminine Alterities: From Psychoanalysis to Gender Studies 'As If the Sex Mattered': Beckett's Degenderations Conclusion: Beckett and the Anethical Notes Bibliography Index

In Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity Weller argues through an analysis of the interrelated topics of translation, comedy, and gender that to read Beckett in this way is to miss the strangely 'anethical' nature of his work, as opposed to the notion that the literary event constitutes the affirmation of an alterity.