Beckett and Modernism

Olga Beloborodova, Dirk Van Hulle, Pim Verhulst, Olga Beloborodova, Dirk Van Hulle, Pim Verhulst

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319703732
• eBook ISBN: 9783319703749
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book of collected essays approaches Beckett's work through the context of modernism, while situating it in the literary tradition at large. It builds on current debates aiming to redefine 'modernism' in connection to concepts such as 'late modernism' or 'postmodernism'. Instead of definitively re-categorizing Beckett under any of these labels, the essays use his diverse oeuvre – encompassing poetry, criticism, prose, theatre, radio and film – as a case study to investigate and reassess the concept of 'modernism after postmodernism' in all its complexity, covering a broad range of topics spanning Beckett's entire career. In addition to more thematic essays about art, history, politics, psychology and philosophy, the collection places his work in relation to that of other modernists such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, as well as to the literary canon in general. It represents an important contribution to both Beckett studies and modernism studies.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction Negative Modernism: Beckett’s Poetics of Pejorism and Literary Enactment
• How Beckett Has Modified Modernism: From Beckett to Blanchot and Bataille
• From Language Revolution to Literature of the Unword: Beckett as Late Modernist
• Late and Belated Modernism: Duchamp…Stein.Feininger..Beckett
• Beckett and Joyce: Two Nattering Nabobs of Negativity
• Beckett, Lewis, Joyce: Reading Dream of Fair to Middling Women through The Apes of God and Ulysses
• ‘Omniscience and omnipotence’: Molloy and the End of ‘Joyceology’
• ‘A new occasion, a new term of relation’: Samuel Beckett and T. S. Eliot
• ‘The gantelope of sense and nonsense run’: Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates in the 1930s
• Schenectady Putters and Leaving Certificate Ta-Tas: Satirizing Irish Nation-Building in ‘Echo’s Bones’
• Samuel Beckett’s ‘Le Concentrisme’ and the Modernist Literary Hoax
• Theoretical and Theatrical Intersections: Samuel Beckett, Herbert Blau, Civil Rights, and the Politics of Godot
• Samuel Beckett and Modern Dance
• ‘Execrations on another plane’: Film Theory in Close Up and Beckett’s Late Prose
• ‘Temporarily sane’: Beckett, Modernism, and the Ethics of Suicide
• Broadcasting the Mind: Extended Cognition in Beckett’s Radio Plays
• Back Matter