Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath

Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath – Ebook Instant Download/Delivery ISBN(s): 9780198822547,0198822545,9780192555502, 0192555502

Product detail:

• ISBN 10: 0192555502
• ISBN 13: 9780192555502
• Author: James McNaughton

Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath explores Beckett’s literary responses to the political maelstroms of his formative and middle years: the Irish civil war and the crisis of commitment in 1930s Europe, the rise of fascism and the atrocities of World War II. Archive yields a Beckett who monitored propaganda in speeches and newspapers, and whose creative work engages with specific political strategies, rhetoric, and events. Finally, Beckett’s political aesthetic sharpens into focus. Deep within form, Beckett models ominous historical developments as surely as he satirizes artistic and philosophical interpretations that overlook them. He burdens aesthetic production with guilt: imagination and language, theater and narrative, all parallel political techniques. Beckett comically embodies conservative religious and political doctrines; he plays Irish colonial history against contemporary European horrors; he examines aesthetic complicity in effecting atrocity and covering it up. This book offers insightful, original, and vivid readings of Beckett’s work up to Three Novels and Endgame.

Table of contents:

1. 1. “The same old mouldy words”: Beckett, Modernism, and the Irish Free State
2. 2. “Echo’s Bones”: Sex, Politics, and Entailment in the Irish Free State
3. 3. Beckett in History: German Diaries, Watt, and the Problem of Propaganda
4. 4. Taking Them at their Word: Politics of the Body in Malone Dies
5. 5. “It all boils down to a question of words”: The Unnamable and History’s Abattoirs
6. 6. “Prophetic Relish”: Famine Politics in Beckett’s Endgame

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