Perhaps no other author than Samuel Beckett has come to represent the modern aesthetics of absurdity and failure. Beckett, writing in English and later in French (self-translated into English), started out as a quasi deciple of Joyce, yet as he stated in 1956 in a New York Times interview, “He’s tending towards omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance”.
In this seminar, we shall explore the span of Beckett’s oeuvre, beginning with his early novel Murphy. We shall study his notorious Trilogy of novels as well as the important plays of the 1950s (“Waiting for Godot”; “Endgame”), to move on to the aesthetic minimalism of the late Beckett, addressing in particular the interplay of performance and text in his prose, theatre, film, and television.
Required reading and editions:
– Murphy (Faber & Faber)
– Three Novels (Grove Press) (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable)
– Complete Dramatic Works (Faber & Faber)
– Complete Short Prose (Faber & Faber)
A moodle course with relevant additional texts will be available. |
