Beckett's Books: A Cultural History of the Interwar Notes

Description

Samuel Beckett is a challenging giant of 20th century literature, and Beckett studies increasingly focus on the interwar period for evidence of Beckett's subsequent embrace of an 'art of failure'. This monograph is based on close analysis of the newly-released notebooks and transcriptions compiled by Beckett from 1929-1940, which shed important and unique insight into Beckett's working methods, original sources and literary development. In particular they reveal the central paradox that Beckett's professions of 'ignorance and impotence' were founded upon extensive erudition and academic practices reflecting his interests in philosophy and psychology. This is the first book to offer an extended study of how recent archival discoveries can contribute to the fundamental transformation of Beckett's truly revolutionary literature.

Matthew Feldman is Professorial Teaching Fellow, Norwegian Study Centre, University of York, UK.

'Exciting new scholarship that will make quite an impression on the Beckett industry, well written and argued, but especially full of empirical evidence that is so often lacking in criticism.' - Professor Geert Lernout, University of Antwerp 'Feldman's study of Beckett is the first to take the measure of the huge hoard of unpublished notebook material that has become available to scholars in the last few years. For the first time, Beckett's voracious reading in philosophy and psychology during the crucial period of the 1930s is fully documented... As a scholar, Feldman is patient, painstaking and undespotic; as an interpreter, he is theoretically alert and flaring with insight and adventure...By teaching us to read as Beckett himself read, Feldman enables us to read him anew. The effect of this work will be seismic. From now on, Beckett studies will have to be dated "AF" - After Feldman.' -Professor Steven Connor, Birkbeck College, University of London 'Matthew Feldman identifies Beckett's early garnering of knowledge as an essential prerequiste of his later espousal of impotence and ignorance. Beckett's Books explores a central paradox: the empirical foundations of Beckett's quest for a nominalist irony that might yet penetrate the silence.' - Chris Ackerley, University of Otago, New Zealand. 'Matthew Feldman's groundbreaking study Beckett's Books is the first scholarly monograph to take full cognisance of the wealth of new archival material available to Beckett scholars since 2002...Feldman employs, with remarkable results, the principle of falsifiability to Becketts' interwar and postwar development. The Notebooks' primary interest is for the light they shed on Beckett's intellectual development... As Feldman convincingly shows, the Notebooks enable us to trace Beckett's unlearning of systematized knowledge as he reaches towards his artistic goals. A significant outcome of Feldman's study will be the re-reading of extant Beckett criticism in the light of this new archival material, a process already well underway, but one which will doubtless evolve further. As we know, there are many possible Becketts: existential, post-structuralist, psychological, religious, postmodern, political-to name a few. Beckett is a global author whose works seems to evoke cross-cultural and theoretically diverse responses. Feldman's attempt to narrow scholarly focus and, through some astute literary archeology, to re-inject empirical precision into Beckett studies comes at an opportune moment and may well send us scuttling back to the archives in our efforts to delve further.-Benjamin Keatinge, Trinity College Dublin