Silence Nowhen; Late Modernism, Minimalism, and Silence in the Work of Samuel Beckett (217) (Currents in Comparative Romance Languages & Literatures)

The 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 Last Tape , Happy Days , the Trilogy , Company , and other works, teases out of Beckett’s minimal aesthetics a Beckettian minimal ethics. In brief glimmers in his texts Beckett provides proleptic hints at reconciliation and the possibility of ethical life that are neither theological nor mystical, but that minimally hold to an alternate rationality from that of the reified world of exchange and catastrophe. The 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{u2019}s work throughout his long career: silence. Chesney links Beckett{u2019}s language and silence back to his predecessors, especially Joyce and Proust {u2013} 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{u2019}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 {u2013} a discourse of silence whose main strategies in Beckett are reticence and ellipsis {u2013} and through studies of Godot, Endgame, Krapp{u2019}s Last Tape, Happy Days, the Trilogy, Company, and other works, teases out of Beckett{u2019}s minimal aesthetics a Beckettian minimal ethics. In brief glimmers in his texts Beckett provides proleptic hints at reconciliation and the possibility of ethical life that are neither theological nor mystical, but that minimally hold to an alternate rationality from that of the reified world of exchange and catastrophe COVER CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ABBREVIATIONS INTRODUCTION 1. TALK ABOUT SILENCE Reticence, Ellipsis, Sigetics War and Silence Les Intarissables 2. SILENCE NOWHEN Dante ... Descartes ... Joyce/Proust: Beckett, Silence, and Tradition Dante-Joyce Dante-Beckett Dante and Silence Descartes-Geulincx Joyce 2 Proust “EXCURSUS” THE SILENCE OF TRADITION: BECKETT AND THE IRISH NOVEL Beckett & (Irish) Co. 3. THE ABSTRACT, THE INCESSANT, THE NEUTRAL Beckett l'Abstracteur Qui parle (et se tait) dans les livres de Samuel Beckett? 4. BECKETT, MINIMALISM, AND THE QUESTION OF POSTMODERNISM Postmodernism as American Avant-Garde Greenberg's Modernism Beckett and Painting Minimalism Lateness 5 MEREMOST MINIMAL MORALIA Introduction An Attempt to Read Adorno's Endspiel After the Endgame Ethical Modernism Meremost Minimal Moralia NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX The 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. This title addresses the main issues in Beckett criticism by focusing on a key aspect of Beckett's work throughout his long career.