Feinberg, Jonathan S.
(2012)
Beckett and Europe: Poesis, Legibility, History.
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
Samuel Beckett’s works are characterized by a pervasive sense of lateness—of having arrived after the peak of European civilization, with no choice but to work with outdated materials—that informs the works’ challenging formal qualities and defines their historical consciousness with regard to the crisis of Europe in the twentieth century. The mutual and reciprocal articulation of this sense of lateness and the works’ radical formal, aesthetic, and even technological experimentation yields an instance of what Edward W. Said has called “late style:” works characterized by an historical untimeliness that is expressed formally. Close readings of the prose fiction reveal a generative, essayistic literary practice that relentlessly assays habitual or conventional literary forms and consistently refuses closure or culmination as only another example of these conventions. This essayistic procedure and its gesture of refusal—the mark of Beckett’s famous “fidelity to failure”—leave traces of the literary forms and conventions that the work has tried on and abandoned as obsolete. Within these traces, an image of Europe emerges—in the moment of its obsolescence—from the vestiges of forms of intelligibility that no longer communicate or have outlasted their use. “Europe,” in this reading, does not stand outside the work as the “context” that renders the work legible to and available for interpretation; rather, it emerges vestigially and in retrospect, as the detritus that the essayistic process of testing and experimentation leaves behind as it searches for new forms of intelligibility that will inaugurate new beginnings. Beckett’s career-long practice of self-translation contributes to this essayistic process by staking out a critical position between languages from which to test the limits and possibilities of each, while his experimentation with new technologies and media in his dramatic works seeks non-literary, non-linguistic poetic means in the wake of literature’s dominance as the bearer of culture.
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Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
|
| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
| Creators | Email | Pitt Username | ORCID  |
|---|
| Feinberg, Jonathan S. | jof1@pitt.edu | JOF1 | |
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| ETD Committee: |
|
| Date: |
15 June 2012 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Defense Date: |
9 April 2012 |
| Approval Date: |
15 June 2012 |
| Submission Date: |
12 April 2012 |
| Access Restriction: |
No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately. |
| Number of Pages: |
191 |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > English |
| Degree: |
PhD - Doctor of Philosophy |
| Thesis Type: |
Doctoral Dissertation |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
Beckett, Europe, History, Literature, Translation, Technology |
| Date Deposited: |
15 Jun 2012 20:13 |
| Last Modified: |
15 Nov 2016 13:57 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/11794 |
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