Samuel Beckett's Critical Aesthetics

✍ Scribed by Tim Lawrence

• Publisher: Springer International Publishing;Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 250
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book considers how Samuel Beckett’s critical essays, dialogues and reflections drew together longstanding philosophical discourses about the nature of representation, and fostered crucial, yet overlooked, connections between these discourses and his fiction and poetry. It also pays attention to Beckett’s writing for little-magazines in France from the 1930s to the 1950s, before going on to consider how the style of Beckett’s late prose recalls and develops figures and themes in his critical writing. By providing a long-overdue assessment of Beckett’s work as a critic, this study shows how Beckett developed a new aesthetic in knowing dialogue with ideas including phenomenology, Kandinsky’s theories of abstraction, and avant-garde movements such as Surrealism. This book will be illuminating for students and researchers interested not just in Beckett, but in literary modernism, the avant-garde, European visual culture and philosophy.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter ....Pages i-xiv
Introduction (Tim Lawrence)....Pages 1-21
Representation and Resistance: Beckett as Reader and Critic (Tim Lawrence)....Pages 23-78
Beckett’s Aesthetic of Vision: Figuration and Surrealist Influence (Tim Lawrence)....Pages 79-122
Transitions and Abstractions: Periodical Culture and Beckett’s Revisions of the Visual (Tim Lawrence)....Pages 123-166
“This Running Against the Walls of Our Cage”: Beckett at the Boundary (Tim Lawrence)....Pages 167-208
Conclusion (Tim Lawrence)....Pages 209-212
Back Matter ....Pages 213-240

✦ Subjects

Literature; Twentieth-Century Literature; Theatre and Performance Studies; Aesthetics; British and Irish Literature; European Literature