Romanticism elaborates a model of fragmentation, different from the fragment as ruined part of a totality from which it is shorn. Rodolphe Gasché argues that the concept of the Romantic fragment would have to be ‘radically recast’ to be applied to contemporary literature. It is via Maurice Blanchot that the fragment is ‘recast’ into an event in which ‘all literature is the fragment’. This book investigates that turn, exploring its implications in the work of  Blanchot, Samuel Beckett and J. M. Coetzee. Blanchot’s ‘recast’ fragment demands that literature become fragmentary whether it carries the form of the fragment or not.

            Beckett’s prose work unfolds a part of fragmentary writing that appears to be degenerative, as words collide and syntactic structures are eroded. However, fragmentary writing allows the presentation of a damaged work, one under the threat of abandonment, as work in progress; being neither finished nor continued.

            The work of Coetzee demonstrates the fragment’s relation to Levinasian ethics, inviting a responsiveness to the ‘other’: a situation that maintains the singularity of the work without reducing it to particular critical positions. The legacy of the fragment remains as much a responsibility for modern literature as for the event of the German Romantic fragment. Fragmentary Futures argues that the fragment points to an impossibility governing the generation of literature itself. The German Romantic fragment is still to come, haunting literature. The ‘recast’ fragment does not exorcise such a revenant but makes its future appearance more fascinating.

Dr Daniel Watt is a Lecturer in English and Drama. His research interests include philosophical and literary influences on theatre and performance in the twentieth century, particularly the work of Samuel Beckett and Tadeusz Kantor. His other research work is focused on literature and ethics, fragmentary writing, and the nature of the puppet, or abject object, in performance.

'Bringing to mind the forgotten legacy of German Romanticism apropos the fragment in its orientation towards an always open futurity, Daniel Watt’s Fragmentary Futures: Blanchot, Beckett, Coetzee stages an urgent intervention in the poetics of the fragmentary and fragmentation. Taking as his focus the texts of Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee, Watt, with admirable intellectual rigour, critical inventiveness and stylistic panache, responds to his singular examples with his own singular acts of ethical attestation. Fragmentary Futures is at once a testimony to the ethical commitment of art in the face of the other, the undecidable and the incommensurable, and also a mnemotechnic of the fragment. Structured as an endlessly open, constantly recast series of fragmentary memories of the future, Fragmentary Futures forces on its readers the inescapable necessity of a continual, self-reflexive interrogation that refuses to find solace in false closure. Daniel Watt has done critics and theorists an invaluable service, whilst, at the same time, situated himself, through his telling critical register, as one of the most significant contemporary spiritual heirs of Jena.'

Julian Wolfreys, author of Writing London: Inventions of the City