Beckett and Aesthetics - Hardcover

Albright, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521829089 ISBN 13: 9780521829083

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2003

Synopsis

As a young man, Samuel Beckett (1906-89) 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 sought escape through allegories of artistic frustration and the art of non-representation and estrangement. Albright depicts Beckett experimenting with the concept that an artistic medium might be made to speak. Engaging with radio, film, television, prose and drama, Albright's Beckett becomes a sophisticated theorist of the very notion of the aesthetic.

About this title

Book Description:

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, self-enclosed word games. Daniel Albright argues that Beckett escaped from this bind by allegories of artistic frustration and through an art of non-representation and estrangement. Albright shows Beckett experimenting with the notion that an artistic medium might itself be made to speak. Engaging with radio, film, and television, prose and drama, Albright's Beckett becomes a sophisticated theorist of the very notion of the aesthetic.

About the Author:

Daniel Albright is Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of many books on music and modernist literature, including Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and the Visual Arts (2000) and Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Source Materials (2003).

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0521829089
• ISBN 13: 9780521829083
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 188