Beckett and AestheticsBeckett and Aesthetics examines Samuel Beckett's struggle with the recalcitrance of artistic media, their refusal to yield to his artistic purposes. As a young man Beckett hoped that writing could provide psychic authenticity and true representation of the physical world; instead he found himself immersed in artificialities and self-enclosed word games. Daniel Albright argues that Beckett escaped from this bind through allegories of artistic frustration and through an art of non-representation, estrangement and general failure. He arrived, Albright shows, at some grasp of fact through the most indirect route available. Albright explores Beckett's experimentation with the notion that an artistic medium might itself be made to speak. This powerful and highly original book explores Beckett's own engagement with radio, film, and television, prose and drama as part of an attempt to escape the confines of the aesthetic. Albright's Beckett becomes a sophisticated theorist of the very notion of the aesthetic. |
Contents
Beckett and Surrealism | 1 |
resisting furniture | 28 |
resisting | 82 |
losing the will to resist | 138 |
Notes | 157 |
Bibliography | 171 |
Common terms and phrases
abstract action actor Adorno aesthetic ah ah ah artistic audience Author Better Served Beckett and Broadcasting Beckett's plays Breton camera characters Clov Collected Shorter Plays dead imagination dialogue drama Dream of Fair Earl Kim Eh Joe Eleuthéria Endgame Estragon Fair to Middling fiction Film Glazier gramophone Grove Press Hamm Happy Days Harmon human Ibid Joyce Kafka Krap Krapp's Last Tape language listener looks Marsyas medium Middling Women Murphy narrator painting parody Pause perhaps Piouk prose protagonist psychomachia radio play René Magritte role Rooney rotunda Rough for Radio Samuel Beckett Schoenberg score of Earthlight script seems sense sort sound space speech story Surrealism Surrealist symbols T. S. Eliot tape recorder television plays Theatrical Notebooks thing Three Novels Victor Vladimir and Estragon voice W. B. Yeats Waiting for Godot Watt whole Winnie words Worstward Worstward Ho writing Yeats's York Zilliacus