English 3554E Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Samuel Beckett, The Symbolic, Zuleika Dobson

• School: Western University
• Department: English
• Course: English 3554E
• Professor: Allan Pero

Document Summary

Takes the spirit of aestheticism and redistributes it. Experience of the sublime viewed from the perspective of the ridiculous. Camp holds comedy and tragedy in a paradoxical balance, refuses to be just one, is always both. Zuleika dobson is not just comic, but because of how it holds onto tragedy, it operates as camp. The duke begins to question whether zuleika is worth dying, but then sees the two owls and knows he must - absurd piece of knowledge/sublimity. Logic of the owls must be followed no matter how nonsensical it is, this is camp. Symbol = thrown together, bring back together. Symptom = fall together, pulled together somehow. The abyss of death still exists, but you trip into it, you look like an idiot falling into it. There is catharsis in tragedy, a purgation of fear and pity. Camp raises the problem of desire and puts it in a new context: shame.