Pioneering scholar of world literature Pascale Casanova died on 29th September at the age of 59. This essay by Xavier de La Porte originally published in L'Obs, looks back at her life and her work.

Literary critic and pioneering scholar of world literature Pascale Casanova died on September 29, 2018, at the age of 59. Her works include the landmark study The World Republic of Letters, as well as books on Kafka, Beckett, and literary nationalism.

In this, the first chapter to her Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution, she argues, via a reading of Beckett's Worstward Ho, against Blanchot's reading of Beckett as offering a testament to the 'unsayable'. Instead, she argues that Worstward Ho "is a summit of Beckett's ars combinatoria, prodigiously controlled and devised, the magisterial conclusion to the whole oeuvre."