Beckett and Modernism

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

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2. Introduction Negative Modernism: Beckett’s Poetics of Pejorism and Literary Enactment

   • Dirk Van Hulle

   Pages 1-18

3. How Beckett Has Modified Modernism: From Beckett to Blanchot and Bataille

   • Jean-Michel Rabaté

   Pages 19-35

4. From Language Revolution to Literature of the Unword: Beckett as Late Modernist

   • Shane Weller

   Pages 37-52

5. Late and Belated Modernism: Duchamp…Stein.Feininger..Beckett

   • Conor Carville

   Pages 53-67

6. Beckett and Joyce: Two Nattering Nabobs of Negativity

   • Sam Slote

   Pages 69-80

7. Beckett, Lewis, Joyce: Reading Dream of Fair to Middling Women through The Apes of God and Ulysses

   • José Francisco Fernández

   Pages 81-94

8. ‘Omniscience and omnipotence’: Molloy and the End of ‘Joyceology’

   • Andy Wimbush

   Pages 95-109

9. ‘A new occasion, a new term of relation’: Samuel Beckett and T. S. Eliot

   • William Davies

   Pages 111-127

10. ‘The gantelope of sense and nonsense run’: Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates in the 1930s

    • Onno Kosters

    Pages 129-145

11. Schenectady Putters and Leaving Certificate Ta-Tas: Satirizing Irish Nation-Building in ‘Echo’s Bones’

    • Feargal Whelan

    Pages 147-159

12. Samuel Beckett’s ‘Le Concentrisme’ and the Modernist Literary Hoax

    • Paul Fagan

    Pages 161-177

13. Theoretical and Theatrical Intersections: Samuel Beckett, Herbert Blau, Civil Rights, and the Politics of Godot

    • S. E. Gontarski

    Pages 179-192

14. Samuel Beckett and Modern Dance

    • Evelyne Clavier

    Pages 193-205

15. ‘Execrations on another plane’: Film Theory in Close Up and Beckett’s Late Prose

    • Galina Kiryushina

    Pages 207-222

16. ‘Temporarily sane’: Beckett, Modernism, and the Ethics of Suicide

    • Ulrika Maude

    Pages 223-237

17. Broadcasting the Mind: Extended Cognition in Beckett’s Radio Plays

    • Olga Beloborodova, Pim Verhulst

    Pages 239-257

18. Back Matter

    Pages 259-295

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This book of collected essays approaches Beckett’s work through the context of modernism, while situating it in the literary tradition at large. It builds on current debates aiming to redefine ‘modernism’ in connection to concepts such as ‘late modernism’ or ‘postmodernism’. Instead of definitively re-categorizing Beckett under any of these labels, the essays use his diverse oeuvre – encompassing poetry, criticism, prose, theatre, radio and film – as a case study to investigate and reassess the concept of ‘modernism after postmodernism’ in all its complexity, covering a broad range of topics spanning Beckett’s entire career. In addition to more thematic essays about art, history, politics, psychology and philosophy, the collection places his work in relation to that of other modernists such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, as well as to the literary canon in general. It represents an important contribution to both Beckett studies and modernism studies.

• Postmodernism
• Historicism
• Radio
• Theatre
• Avant-Garde

“Beckett and Modernism reinvigorates existing debates about the relationship between the author and the artistic movement, and offers a more complex portrait than one might first expect. Its historical summaries offer useful starting points from a range of national and cultural perspectives, …Beckett and Modernism is a collection that offers new insights and several unexpected surprises.” (Rhys Tranter, James Joyce Literary Supplement, Vol. 33 (1), 2019)

• University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

  Olga Beloborodova, Dirk Van Hulle, Pim Verhulst

Olga Beloborodova is a PhD researcher at the University of Antwerp’s Centre for Manuscript Genetics. Her work examines the evocations of fictional minds in Samuel Beckett’s prose and drama according to the paradigm of extended cognition. She is also one of the editors of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project.  


Dirk Van Hulle is Professor of English Literature at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, Director of the Centre for Manuscript Genetics and Co-Director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. His publications include Modern Manuscripts (2014), Samuel Beckett’s Library (with Mark Nixon, 2013) and the New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (2015). 


Pim Verhulst is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp’s Centre for Manuscript Genetics. His recent publications include The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy and Malone meurt / Malone Dies (with Magessa O’Reilly and Dirk Van Hulle, 2017). He is Assistant Editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies.

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