Lawrence Samuel Beckett's Critical Aesthetics

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-3-319-75399-7
Verlag: Springer Nature Switzerland
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 250 Seiten

Reihe: Progress in Mathematics

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.

Tim Lawrence is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, University of York, UK. He has articles and reviews published in outlets including the Journal of Beckett Studies and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui. His research interests lie in the European avant-garde, phenomenology, and twentieth-century visual culture.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lawrence, Tim

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1;Acknowledgments;6
2;Note on the Presentation of Text;8
3;Contents;9
4;Abbreviations;10
5;Chapter 1: Introduction;12
6;Chapter 2: Representation and Resistance: Beckett as Reader and Critic;33
6.1;Figural Evocations;34
6.2;Kant, Schopenhauer and Beckett’s Philosophical Influences;37
6.3;Kant, Cassirer and Interwar Politics;44
6.4;Schopenhauer and the Proustian Equation;48
6.5;Beckett and the “Art d’Incarcération”;54
6.6;A(p)perception and the Eye;60
6.7;Watt’s Pots and Kantian Objects;64
6.8;Vision and Unknowing;69
7;Chapter 3: Beckett’s Aesthetic of Vision: Figuration and Surrealist Influence;89
7.1;“These Long Shifting Thresholds”: Figuring Disappearance;90
7.2;The Surrealist Situation and Murphy in Translation;97
7.3;André Breton and the Surrealist Image;101
7.4;This Quarter and Beckett’s Poetic Adaptations;107
7.5;Surrealist Revisions and Sartrean Objects;113
8;Chapter 4: Transitions and Abstractions: Periodical Culture and Beckett’s Revisions of the Visual;133
8.1;Beckett in Transition: Revising and Reflecting on Surrealism;133
8.2;Beckett and Kandinsky: Critical and Creative Abstraction;148
8.3;Formal Reflections: Kandinsky in Watt and Beyond;155
8.4;Kandinsky’s Concretions: Philosophy and Form;162
8.5;Figure and Ground, Vision and Voice in Premier Amour;166
9;Chapter 5: “This Running Against the Walls of Our Cage”: Beckett at the Boundary;177
9.1;Figural Connections: L’Innommable, Mercier et Camier and Foirades;179
9.2;The Fragment between Criticism and Fiction;187
9.3;Beckett, Bataille and the Ends of Limitation;190
9.4;Wittgenstein’s Aesthetics and the Late Beckettian Limit;192
9.5;The Impossible View: The Limits of Thought in “Imagination Dead Imagine”;199
9.6;Figuring the Unfigurable: Blanchot, Bataille and Rhetorical Delineations of the Limit;203
10;Chapter 6: Conclusion;219
11;Bibliography;223
11.1;Published Works by Samuel Beckett;223
11.2;Archival Sources;225
11.3;Secondary Sources;225
12;Index;245