Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction provides an overdue investigation into Beckett’s rich influences over American writing. Through in-depth readings of postmodern authors such as Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster and Lydia Davis, this book situates Beckett’s post-war writing of exhaustion and generation in relation to the emergence of an explosive American avant-garde. In turn, this study provides a valuable insight into the practical realities of Beckett’s dissemination in America, following the author’s long-standing relationship with the countercultural magazine Evergreen Review and its dramatic role in redrawing the possibilities of American culture in the 1960s. While Beckett would be largely removed from his American context, this book follows his vigorous, albeit sometimes awkward, reception alongside the authors and institutions central to shaping his legacies in 20th and 21st century America.
Author(s): James Baxter
Series: New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 271
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Beckett in America: ‘somehow not the right country…’
‘Unlikely, if not odd’: Beckett, Rosset and American Postmodernism
Notes on Methodology: Postmodernism, Post-Beckett?
References
Chapter 2: Evergreen Review, 1957–1984: Beckett and the American ‘Underground’
1957–1963: The Invention of ‘Vulgar Modernism’
1964–1967: Postmodernism, or the Populist ‘Underground’
1968–1984: After the ‘Underground’
References
Chapter 3: Problems and Pratfalls: Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme and Metafictional Style After Beckett
Robert Coover’s ‘Last Quixote’: Circles, Cycles and the ‘Nothing New’
‘Something that is not Beckett’: Donald Barthelme and the ‘Problem’ of Beckett
References
Chapter 4: ‘…between zero and one’: Opposing Tendencies in the Exhaustive Fiction of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Pynchon
‘I found academic people deeply alarmed…’: The ‘Centrifugal Lures’ of Evergreen Review and Anti-academic Unreadability in Watt and Gravity’s Rainbow
Admitting the Chaos: ‘Centripetal’ and ‘Centrifugal’ Force in the Entropic Fiction of Beckett and Pynchon
References
Chapter 5: Don DeLillo’s Reinvention of ‘Beckett World’
‘Painkillers’: The World and the Nuclear Metaphor—From Endgame to End Zone
The Incorporation of ‘the last writer’: Dying Writers and ‘dead’ Books
‘Fiction of estrangement’: Insinuations of Beckett in the Diminished Landscapes of Late DeLillo
References
Chapter 6: Paul Auster, Lydia Davis and Beckett’s Post-Millennial Legacies
‘Samuel Beckett was and is a special case’: Paul Auster and Trans-Atlantic Beckettianism
‘Further confusing such already confusing words’: Lydia Davis’ Footnotes to Beckett
References
Chapter 7: A ‘Postmodern Icon’?
References
Index
