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Samuel Beckett Andrew Gibson

Samuel Beckett By Andrew Gibson

Samuel Beckett by Andrew Gibson


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Summary

A biography of Samuel Beckett, one of the most innovative and influential, yet most private, literary figures of the twentieth century. Andrew Gibson focuses on Beckett's life in a particular place and moment in time, and on the specific text or texts that he wrote during that period.

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Samuel Beckett Summary

Samuel Beckett by Andrew Gibson

The life of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) has been the subject of exhaustive scholarship, yet by contrast Beckett himself was a spare, minimalist writer who deeply distrusted the techniques of biography. In this new, concise, critical account of Beckett's life and work, Andrew Gibson seeks to remain faithful to the writer's artistic aims, staying close to Beckett's style of thought and work in his analysis of this supremely modern figure. Beckett's Rockaby ends with a resounding 'fuck life': Samuel Beckett takes as its touchstone the formidable Beckettian drive to give up on the world. Gibson locates the logic of Beckett's drive through an analysis of his responses to modern history, showing how Beckett came to have an unusually profound feeling for the Zeitgeist, and a power of conveying it unrivalled by any other contemporary artist. This book tracks Beckett's painful progress through the historical situations that defined his experience: Ireland after independence, Paris and the Aecole Normale Superieure in the late twenties, London in the thirties, Nazi Germany, Vichy France, the early years of the Fourth Republic, the Cold War and the triumph of Capital in the 1980s. It also analyses the (often muted and oblique) traces of and responses to these situations in a range of Beckett's works. As Gibson cogently argues, Beckett was devastated by modern history without being finally completely overpowered by it. He shows that Beckett espoused an extreme version of the Romantic doctrine that art is a criticism of historical forms of life, but also that Beckett's version is wryly ironical and perverse, for it stubbornly refuses to assume that life can ever say its final word.

About Andrew Gibson

Andrew Gibson is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is coeditor of Reaktion's London from Punk to Blair and the author of Joyce's Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in 'Ulysses' and James Joyce, the latter also published by Reaktion.

Additional information

CIN1861895178G
9781861895172
1861895178
Samuel Beckett by Andrew Gibson
Used - Good
Paperback
Reaktion Books
20091001
192
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

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