Becketts Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism

Samuel Becketts work is littered with ironic self-reflexive comments on presumed audience expectations that it should ultimately make explicable sense. An ample store of letters and anecdotes suggests Becketts own preoccupation with and resistance to similar interpretive mindsets. Yet until now such concerns have remained the stuff of scholarly footnotes and asides. Becketts Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism addresses these issues head-on and investigates how Becketts ideas about who he writes for affect what he writes. What it finds speaks to current understandings not only of Becketts techniques and ambitions, but also of modernisms experiments as fundamentally compromised challenges to enshrined ways of understanding and organizing the social world. Becketts uniquely anxious audience-targeting brings out similarly self-doubting strategies in the work of other experimental twentieth-century writers and artists in whom he is interested: his corpus proves emblematic of a modernism that understands its inability to achieve transformative social effects all at once, but that nevertheless judiciously complicates too-neat distinctions drawn within ongoing culture wars. For its re-evaluations of four key points of orientation for understanding Becketts artistic ambitionshis arch critical pronouncements, his postwar conflations of value and valuelessness, his often-ambiguous self-commentary, and his sardonic metatheatrical playas well as for its running dialogue with wider debates around modernism as a social phenomenon, this book is of interest to students and researchers interested in Beckett, modernism, and the relations between modern and contemporary artistic and social developments.