Beckett and Aesthetics

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by Daniel Albright

Cambridge University Press

Due/Published March 2004, 188 pages, cloth

ISBN 0521829089

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 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. 7 half-tones 8 music examples

 Contents

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.