Samuel Beckett's Critical Aesthetics
by Tim Lawrence /
2018 / English / PDF
2.1 MB Download
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.
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.
