Beckett and Aesthetics

This 2003 book engages with radio, film, television, prose and drama and shows Beckett as a sophisticated theorist of aesthetics.

Daniel Albright (Author)

9780521829083, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 December 2003

188 pages, 7 b/w illus. 8 music examples
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.45 kg

"...an intellectual tour de force that offers a profound and lucid analysis of Beckett's artistic practice. Albright is at ease with the numerous discourses he uses and writes poetically and provocatively. For its elegance, rigour, and insights, Beckett and Aesthetics ought to be required reading for anyone interested in Beckett's drama and performance work." Modern Drama

Beckett and Aesthetics, first published in 2003, examines Samuel Beckett's struggle with the recalcitrance of artistic media, their refusal to yield to his artistic purposes. As a young man Beckett hoped that writing could provide psychic authenticity and true representation of the physical world; instead he found himself immersed in artificialities and self-enclosed word games. Daniel Albright argues that Beckett escaped from this bind through allegories of artistic frustration and through an art of non-representation, estrangement and general failure. He arrived, Albright shows, at some grasp of fact through the most indirect route available. Albright explores Beckett's experimentation with the notion that an artistic medium might itself be made to speak. This powerful and highly original book explores Beckett's own engagement with radio, film, and television, prose and drama as part of an attempt to escape the confines of the aesthetic. Albright's Beckett becomes a sophisticated theorist of the very notion of the aesthetic.

Illustrations
Music examples
Introduction: Beckett and surrealism
1. Stage: resisting failure
2. Tape recorder, radio, film, television: resisting the human image
3. Music: losing the will to resist.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG]