Trapped in Thought: A Study of the Beckettian Mentality (Irish Studies) - Hardcover

Levy, Eric P.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0815631022 ISBN 13: 9780815631026

Publisher: Syracuse University Press, 2007

Synopsis

Eric P. Levy’s book investigates the mentality or attitude of cognitive apprehension expressed in Beckettian texts. Primary areas of concern include how the Beckettian attitude began, what concepts it invents or transforms to sustain its mode of thought, how the mentality wards off factors which would refute or heal it, and, most paradoxical of all, why this mentality ultimately reduces the mind to an estranged source of thought, continuously repudiated by its own awareness. The study uncovers the strategies by which experience is evacuated of all content but that consistent with the attitude registering it.

About this title

About the Author:

Eric P. Levy is Associate Professor at The University of British Columbia. He is the author of Beckett and the Voice of Species: A Study of the Prose Fiction and Hamlet and the Rethinking of Man, as well as fifty-five articles on topics and texts pertaining to Twentieth Century American Literature, Renaissance British Literature, Victorian British Literature, Twentieth-Century British and Irish Literature, and other subjects, including one article on Christology. His work has earned seventeen republications in anthologies and critical studies.

Review:

Levy offers an excellent account of motives for perpetuating pain using fascinating examples from Beckett's oeuvre --James Joyce Literary Supplement

Levy has attempted to explain Beckettian ambivalence by tracing the different ways in which the Beckettian self is an unstable compound of expression and silence, presence and absence, content and emptiness. In his expert negotiation of the spaces between these terms, Levy proves himself an excellent guide to the terrain. --The Beckett Circle

Throughout Trapped in Thought: A Study of the Beckettian Mentality, Levy refers extensively to preceding scholarship, while diverging from it to offer a weighty and original philosophical analysis of the foundations of Beckettian thought. --New Hibernia Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0815631022
• ISBN 13: 9780815631026
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 260