Jeff Fort is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Imperative to Write (2014) and translator of more than a dozen books, by Jean Genet, Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others.

"Jeff Fort writes with energy and verve, ambitiously tackles some formidably difficult works, and treats in this study an extensive and important corpus of some key figures in literary modernism." -- -Alain Toumayan University of Notre Dame "The Imperative to Write examines three formidably difficult and fascinating writers of the last century: Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett. Jeff Fort analyzes the exigency to write in each of the three, and produces a powerful study of these major authors. A 'tour de force' of close reading." -- -Kevin Hart University of Virginia "In this ambitious and wide-ranging book, Jeff Fort addresses some of the most enduring and intractable issues affecting modern literature." -- -Leslie Hill University of Warwick

• List of Abbreviations Introduction: "Why Do You Write?"-The Fault of Writing Part I: Kafka 1. Kafka's Teeth: The Literary Gewissenbiss 2. The Ecstasy of Judgment: Ungrasping Justice 3. Embodied Violence and the Leap from the Law: "In the Penal Colony" and The Trial 4. Degradation of the Sublime: "A Hunger Artist" Part II: Blanchot 5. Pointed Instants: Blanchot's Exigencies 6. The Shell and the Mask: L'arret de mort 7. The Dead Look: The Death Mask, the Corpse Image, and the Haunting of Fiction Part III: Beckett 8. Beckett's Voices and the Paradox of Expression Conclusion: Speech Unredeemed-From the Call of Conscience to the Torture of Language Notes Bibliography Index