Samuel Beckett

Fülszöveg

SÁMUEL BECKETT A Critical Study This new printing of a pioneer study of the great Irish writer bears a supplementary chapter on Beckett's most recent work, much of which is virtually unknown in the United States. Ever since Waiting for Godot brought hím international fame fifteen years ago, Sámuel Beckett has been glibly epitomized as the evangelist of a view of the world so special in its own gloom as to have only morbid interest for normál minds. It is Mr. Kenner's contention, on the contrary, that Beckett is primarily a comic writer, and that the comedy he exploits - an affair of intellectual catastrophes - stems from the seventeenth-century attempt to think of people as machines and of language as a slightly imperfect department of mathematics. The author investigates with pith and economy Beckett's lifelong preoccupation with the nature of the média of expression themselves: the patterns of logic built into language, the totál solitude in which the novelist carries on his... Tovább

Fülszöveg

SÁMUEL BECKETT A Critical Study This new printing of a pioneer study of the great Irish writer bears a supplementary chapter on Beckett's most recent work, much of which is virtually unknown in the United States. Ever since Waiting for Godot brought hím international fame fifteen years ago, Sámuel Beckett has been glibly epitomized as the evangelist of a view of the world so special in its own gloom as to have only morbid interest for normál minds. It is Mr. Kenner's contention, on the contrary, that Beckett is primarily a comic writer, and that the comedy he exploits - an affair of intellectual catastrophes - stems from the seventeenth-century attempt to think of people as machines and of language as a slightly imperfect department of mathematics. The author investigates with pith and economy Beckett's lifelong preoccupation with the nature of the média of expression themselves: the patterns of logic built into language, the totál solitude in which the novelist carries on his craft, the confinement of actors to an enclosed space called the stage, at which an audience is silently staring. In Beckett's constricted and minimai art the reality before us-insisting on being nothing more than what it is-paradoxically puts forth shadowy but portentous meanings, which we see so to speak from a corner of the eye. These effects, Mr. Kenner suggests, are Beckettian jokes, and their most cosmic intimation is that the universe plays similar tricks on our faculties. In concerning itself with internál structures discoverable in the work rather than with putative moods and messages naively attributed to the man, this book holds a unique place in the growing literature devoted to the phenomenon of Sámuel Beckett. "There are few intellectual encounters as engaging as the most accomplished critic of the age sustaining for 200 pages a brilliant analysis of the subtlest comic imagination of our time. ... his Beckett. . . takes its place as a masíerpiece in the Kenner canon." -Guy Davenport in The National Review HUGH KENNER, Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has written many books on contemporary literature. Vissza