Description
Book SynopsisThe dramatic and prose works of Samuel Beckett have long been understood as central to twentieth-century literature and particularly to questions about aesthetics, ethics, and the modernism-postmodernism distinction. Duncan McColl Chesney addresses many of the main issues in Beckett criticism by focusing on a key aspect of Beckett's work throughout his long career: silence. Chesney links Beckett's language and silence back to his predecessors, especially Joyce and Proust laterally to contemporary movements of minimalism in the sister arts and theoretically in in-depth discussions of Blanchot and Adorno. By doing so, Chesney addresses how Beckett's works remain true, to the end, to a minimalist impulse that is essentially modernist or late modernist without giving over to the rising dominant of postmodernism. Chesney delineates a sigetics a discourse of silence whose main strategies in Beckett are reticence and ellipsis and through studies of
Godot,
Endgame,
Krapp's
