Chronicles of disorder: Samuel Beckett and the cultural politics of postwar narrative.
Item
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Title
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Chronicles of disorder: Samuel Beckett and the cultural politics of postwar narrative.
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Identifier
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AAI9530928
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identifier
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9530928
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Creator
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Weisberg, David Harris.
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Contributor
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Adviser: John Brenkman
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Date
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1995
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English | Literature, Modern | Literature, Romance
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Abstract
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Methodologically drawing on cultural critics, from Walter Benjamin to Raymond Williams, the dissertation interprets key Beckett texts and demonstrates how his fiction developed in relation to 20th-century notions about the social function of art. Beckett's fiction took shape in two contexts. His interwar prose is dominated by the figure of the bohemian-aesthete and thematically values impassivity, a-rationality and a rejection of communication. But the arcane allusions and the narrative organization contradict these themes by implicitly valuing communication, traditional "high" knowledges and conscious work. These implicit contradictions are emblems of Beckett's ambivalent allegiance to a set of conflicting cultural values: aesthetic autonomy; the unconscious and the a-rational; the avant-garde's attack on the institution of art; Joycean modernism's mixing of high and low cultural forms; and the political commitments of the 1930s. In his early fiction Beckett struggled with and failed to find a form adequate to reconcile these contradictory attitudes and ideals. The war changed Beckett's self-understanding as an artist and his relation to high modernism and the avant-garde. The contradictions in the earlier works are, in the postwar fiction, explicitly incorporated into the artistic material. Beckett counterposes a symbolic content of alienation, impoverishment, and coercive social hierarchy with a disruptive experimentation with subjective voice and narrative form. The earlier defense of inaction becomes a paradox about the meaning of individual action; the omniscient narration becomes a contradictory first-person voice that is both eloquent and "silent"; and convoluted plot devices derived from modernist, urban narrative become a place-less narrative experiment formed in conjunction with the narrator's loss of a modern identity. Beckett's postwar fiction bears a significant relation to debates about society and literature which reached paradigmatic form after the war: Sartre's call for commitment, Adorno's defense of aesthetic autonomy and Barthes' notion of the "writerly." While critics of the postwar period understood these positions as antithetical, Beckett's fiction reveals a powerful attempt to re-imagine, beyond the oppositions of commitment and autonomy, a relation between political ethics and innovative fiction.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
