Beckett's Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism

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.

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

Auteur

Nick Wolterman is an independent scholar and holds a PhD in English and Related Literature from the University of York, UK.

Contenu

Introduction

Ideal Uninterpretablity: Beckett's Aporetic Ambitions

Un-ideal Interpreters, Targeted Ambiguities: Beckett and Modernism

Janus-Faced Arguments: Beckett's Interwar Essays and Other Self-Divided Defenses of Modernism

Paradoxical Principles in Proust, Joyce, and the Joyce Circle

Beckett's Overdetermined Target Audiences Experimental Explanations as Weak Modernist Criticism Impossible Anti-values: Beckett's Postwar Writing and the Self-defeating Pursuit of Absolute Loss

Mimesis and Artistic Value in "Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit"

Non-productive Anti-values in Bataille and Beckett

Repetition as Expenditure in Molloy and Waiting for Godot

The Productivity of Inattention

Beckett's Failure to Fail

Slippery Self-commentaries: Avant-garde Celebrity from Dream to Endgame

Ineradicable Constructednesss in Tzara and Beckett

Self-undermining Authority in Tzara and Beckett

Dreams of Infinite Delay in Duchamp and Beckett

Celebrity as an Artistic Medium

Staged Compromises: Anticipating Appropriation from Eleutheria to Havel to Catastrophe

The Difficulties of Directness

Targeting the Beckett Brand

Creative Infidelity

Re-targeting Modernist Failure