Klappentext

Samuel Beckett s work is littered with ironic self-reflexive comments on presumed audience expectations that it should ultimately make explicable sense. An ample store of letters and anecdotes suggests Beckett s own preoccupation with and resistance to similar interpretive mindsets. Yet until now such concerns have remained the stuff of scholarly footnotes and asides.

Beckett s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism addresses these issues head-on and investigates how Beckett s ideas about who he writes for affect what he writes. What it finds speaks to current understandings not only of Beckett s techniques and ambitions, but also of modernism s experiments as fundamentally compromised challenges to enshrined ways of understanding and organizing the social world. Beckett s uniquely anxious audience-targeting brings out similarly self-doubting strategies in the work of other experimental twentieth-century writers and artists in whom he is interested: his corpus proves emblematic of a modernism that understands its inability to achieve transformative social effects all at once, but that nevertheless judiciously complicates too-neat distinctions drawn within ongoing culture wars.

For its re-evaluations of four key points of orientation for understanding Beckett s artistic ambitions his arch critical pronouncements, his postwar conflations of value and valuelessness, his often-ambiguous self-commentary, and his sardonic metatheatrical play as well as for its running dialogue with wider debates around modernism as a social phenomenon, this book is of interest to students and researchers interested in Beckett, modernism, and the relations between modern and contemporary artistic and social developments.