Negative modernism: Beckett’s poetics of pejorism and literary enactment
The relationship between Beckett and modernism remains a much-contested issue in Beckett studies and beyond. Beckett’s place in the modernist canon has been questioned both on the grounds of periodization and style, with the term ‘late modernist’ increasingly gaining ground in the more recent schola...
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| Format: | Book section |
| Language: | English |
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Palgrave Macmillan
2018
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| Summary: | The relationship between Beckett and modernism remains a much-contested issue in Beckett studies and beyond. Beckett’s place in the modernist canon has been questioned both on the grounds of periodization and style, with the term ‘late modernist’ increasingly gaining ground in the more recent scholarship. Without disputing Weller’s definition, this essay suggests a different approach by foregrounding Beckett’s trademark ‘fidelity to failure’ and his radical denial of the Leibnizian concept of theodicy. To explore the philosophical prehistory of what could be termed Beckett’s negative modernism, it first discusses the ‘epiphanic’ modernism of his more canonical predecessors and then traces the contours of Beckett’s own poetics of ‘pejorism’ (a term he coined in the margins of his copy of Olga Plümacher’s Der Pessimismus and in his ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook) to examine how his negative modernism is enacted in his works. |
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