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.
