Modernism - Literary Movements, Postmodernism - Literary Movements, 20th Century Irish Fiction & Prose Literature - Literary Criticism, 19th Century French Literature - Literary Criticism, 20th Century French Literature - Literary Criticism

Samuel Beckett and the end of modernity

Name: Samuel Beckett and the end of modernity
Author: Richard Begam
ISBN: 9780804727310

by Begam, Richard

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Overview

This study explores the relation between Samuel Beckett's five major novels - Murphy, Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable - and the phenomenon that Lyotard, Habermas, and Vattimo have described as the "end of modernity." Through close readings of Beckett's "pentalogy," the author shows how these novels, written between 1935 and 1950, strikingly anticipate many of the defining themes and ideas of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida - from madness and the cogito to the "death of the author" and the "end of the book," from differance and unnamability to the "end of man" and the "beginning of writing."