Samuel Beckett's Critical Aesthetics

Acknowledgments

Note on the Presentation of Text

Contents

Abbreviations

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Representation and Resistance: Beckett as Reader and Critic

Figural Evocations

Kant, Schopenhauer and Beckett’s Philosophical Influences

Kant, Cassirer and Interwar Politics

Schopenhauer and the Proustian Equation

Beckett and the “Art d’Incarcération”

A(p)perception and the Eye

Watt’s Pots and Kantian Objects

Vision and Unknowing

Chapter 3: Beckett’s Aesthetic of Vision: Figuration and Surrealist Influence

“These Long Shifting Thresholds”: Figuring Disappearance

The Surrealist Situation and Murphy in Translation

André Breton and the Surrealist Image

This Quarter and Beckett’s Poetic Adaptations

Surrealist Revisions and Sartrean Objects

Chapter 4: Transitions and Abstractions: Periodical Culture and Beckett’s Revisions of the Visual

Beckett in Transition: Revising and Reflecting on Surrealism

Beckett and Kandinsky: Critical and Creative Abstraction

Formal Reflections: Kandinsky in Watt and Beyond

Kandinsky’s Concretions: Philosophy and Form

Figure and Ground, Vision and Voice in Premier Amour

Chapter 5: “This Running Against the Walls of Our Cage”: Beckett at the Boundary

Figural Connections: L’Innommable, Mercier et Camier and Foirades

The Fragment between Criticism and Fiction

Beckett, Bataille and the Ends of Limitation

Wittgenstein’s Aesthetics and the Late Beckettian Limit

The Impossible View: The Limits of Thought in “Imagination Dead Imagine”

Figuring the Unfigurable: Blanchot, Bataille and Rhetorical Delineations of the Limit

Chapter 6: Conclusion

Bibliography

Published Works by Samuel Beckett

Archival Sources

Secondary Sources

Index