Wolterman Beckett’s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-3-031-05650-5
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 204 Seiten, eBook

Reihe: New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century

Samuel Beckett’s work is littered with ironic self-reflexive comments on presumed audience expectations that it should ultimately make explicable sense. An ample store of letters and anecdotes suggests Beckett’s own preoccupation with and resistance to similar interpretive mindsets. Yet until now such concerns have remained the stuff of scholarly footnotes and asides.

Beckett’s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism addresses these issues head-on and investigates how Beckett’s ideas about who he writes for affect what he writes. What it finds speaks to current understandings not only of Beckett’s techniques and ambitions, but also of modernism’s experiments as fundamentally compromised challenges to enshrined ways of understanding and organizing the social world. Beckett’s uniquely anxious audience-targeting brings out similarly self-doubting strategies in the work of other experimental twentieth-century writers and artists in whom he is interested: his corpus proves emblematic of a modernism that understands its inability to achieve transformative social effects all at once, but that nevertheless judiciously complicates too-neat distinctions drawn within ongoing culture wars.

For its re-evaluations of four key points of orientation for understanding Beckett’s artistic ambitions—his arch critical pronouncements, his postwar conflations of value and valuelessness, his often-ambiguous self-commentary, and his sardonic metatheatrical play—as well as for its running dialogue with wider debates around modernism as a social phenomenon, this book is of interest to students and researchers interested in Beckett, modernism, and the relations between modern and contemporary artistic and social developments.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wolterman, Nick

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Introduction.- 2. Janus-Faced Arguments: Beckett’s Interwar Essays and Other Self-Divided Defenses of Modernism.- 3. Impossible Anti-values: Beckett’s Postwar Writing and the Self-defeating Pursuit of Absolute Loss.- 4. Slippery Self-commentaries: Avant-garde Celebrity from
Dream
to
Endgame
.- 5. Staged Compromises: Anticipating Appropriation from
Eleutheria
to Havel to
Catastrophe
. 6. Re-targeting Modernist Failure

Über Autor(innen)

Nick Wolterman
is an independent scholar based in York, UK. He received his PhD in English and Related Literature from the University of York.