Beckett and Modernism

✍ Scribed by Olga Beloborodova, Dirk Van Hulle, Pim Verhulst

• Publisher: Springer International Publishing;Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 299
• Series: Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter ....Pages i-xvi
Introduction Negative Modernism: Beckett’s Poetics of Pejorism and Literary Enactment (Dirk Van Hulle)....Pages 1-18
How Beckett Has Modified Modernism: From Beckett to Blanchot and Bataille (Jean-Michel Rabaté)....Pages 19-35
From Language Revolution to Literature of the Unword: Beckett as Late Modernist (Shane Weller)....Pages 37-52
Late and Belated Modernism: Duchamp…Stein.Feininger..Beckett (Conor Carville)....Pages 53-67
Beckett and Joyce: Two Nattering Nabobs of Negativity (Sam Slote)....Pages 69-80
Beckett, Lewis, Joyce: Reading Dream of Fair to Middling Women through The Apes of God and Ulysses (José Francisco Fernández)....Pages 81-94
‘Omniscience and omnipotence’: Molloy and the End of ‘Joyceology’ (Andy Wimbush)....Pages 95-109
‘A new occasion, a new term of relation’: Samuel Beckett and T. S. Eliot (William Davies)....Pages 111-127
‘The gantelope of sense and nonsense run’: Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates in the 1930s (Onno Kosters)....Pages 129-145
Schenectady Putters and Leaving Certificate Ta-Tas: Satirizing Irish Nation-Building in ‘Echo’s Bones’ (Feargal Whelan)....Pages 147-159
Samuel Beckett’s ‘Le Concentrisme’ and the Modernist Literary Hoax (Paul Fagan)....Pages 161-177
Theoretical and Theatrical Intersections: Samuel Beckett, Herbert Blau, Civil Rights, and the Politics of Godot (S. E. Gontarski)....Pages 179-192
Samuel Beckett and Modern Dance (Evelyne Clavier)....Pages 193-205
‘Execrations on another plane’: Film Theory in Close Up and Beckett’s Late Prose (Galina Kiryushina)....Pages 207-222
‘Temporarily sane’: Beckett, Modernism, and the Ethics of Suicide (Ulrika Maude)....Pages 223-237
Broadcasting the Mind: Extended Cognition in Beckett’s Radio Plays (Olga Beloborodova, Pim Verhulst)....Pages 239-257
Back Matter ....Pages 259-295

✦ Subjects

Literature; Twentieth-Century Literature; European Literature; British and Irish Literature