Samuel Beckett's Critical Aesthetics (eBook)

Tim Lawrence (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2018 | 1st ed. 2018
XIV, 240 Seiten
Springer International Publishing (Verlag)
978-3-319-75399-7 (ISBN)

Infos

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.

Inhalt

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

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 19.4.2018
• Zusatzinfo: XIV, 240 p.
• Verlagsort: Cham
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Schlagworte: British and Irish Literature • Canon • ethics • Philosophy • Prose • Translation
• ISBN-10: 3-319-75399-1 / 3319753991
• ISBN-13: 978-3-319-75399-7 / 9783319753997