Beckett and Aesthetics

Erscheinungsjahr 2012
ISBN: 978-0-521-82908-3
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 188 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 431 g

Beckett 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Albright, Daniel

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Irische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Illustrations; Music examples; Introduction: Beckett and surrealism; 1. Stage: resisting failure; 2. Tape recorder, radio, film, television: resisting the human image; 3. Music: losing the will to resist.

Über Autor(innen)

Albright, Daniel
Daniel Albright is Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of many books on music and modernist literature, including Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism (Cambridge 1997), Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and the Visual Arts (2000) and Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Source Materials (2003).