
Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity
Richard Begam(Author)
Stanford University Press
Published on 1. January 1996
Book
Hardback
260 pages
978-0-8047-2731-0 (ISBN)
Description
This study explores the relation between Samuel Beckett s five major novels Murphy, Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable and the phenomenon that Lyotard, Habermas, and Vattimo have described as the end of modernity. Through close readings of Beckett s pentalogy, the author shows how these novels, written between 1935 and 1950, strikingly anticipate many of the defining themes and ideas of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida from madness and the cogito to the death of the author and the end of the book, from diffZrance and unnamability to the end of man and the beginning of writing. The book begins by situating Beckett in relation to a postmodern philosophical tradition, largely defined by Nietzsche and Heidegger, and a modern literary tradition, most notably represented by Proust and Joyce. The author argues against the tendency to treat the postmodern as the negation of Enlightenment thinking, a form of overcoming in which the modern is replaced by the anti-modern. In the place of this antithetical postmodernism, the author proposes a diffZrantial postmodernism.
Especially important in this regard is Derrida s claim that there is never any question of choosing between modernity (what he calls Western metaphysics) and some term of opposition (the overcoming of metaphysics). Rather, Derrida recommends practicing a new writing which simultaneously brings together two kinds of deconstruction one that works critically within the tradition and one that projects itself imaginatively beyond the tradition.
Especially important in this regard is Derrida s claim that there is never any question of choosing between modernity (what he calls Western metaphysics) and some term of opposition (the overcoming of metaphysics). Rather, Derrida recommends practicing a new writing which simultaneously brings together two kinds of deconstruction one that works critically within the tradition and one that projects itself imaginatively beyond the tradition.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Palo Alto
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 224 mm
Width: 147 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
447 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8047-2731-0 (9780804727310)
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Schweitzer Classification
Content
A note on texts; Introduction; 1. Differance: unnamability, postmodernity; 2. Madness and the cognito in Murphy; 3. Beyond the metaphysics of presence: Watt and the autobiography of negation; 4. Beckett's mirror-writing: doubling and differance in Molloy; 5. Malone Dies: the death of the author and the end of the book; 6. The unnamable: the end of man and the beginning of writing; Afterword; Notes; Works cited; Index.