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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.
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.
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