Samuel Beckett's How It Is: Philosophy in Translation

Anthony Cordingley

Published by Edinburgh University Press 2018

Samuel Beckett's How It Is

Philosophy in Translation

Anthony Cordingley

In the series Other Becketts

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474440622

Overview
Contents

About this book

The first sustained exegesis of a neglected masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, Samuel Beckett’s How It Is

Offers the first comprehensive treatment of Beckett’s most poorly understood novel, identifying the breadth of its philosophical and literary sources
Makes extensive use of manuscript evidence and newly accessible notes from Beckett’s reading in philosophy
Guides the reader through Beckett’s philosophical and theological sources, highlighting his innovative and original dialectics between the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, the Ancient Stoics, the early Church Fathers and desert mystics, seventeenth-century mystics and Rationalists

This book maps out the novel’s complex network of intertexts, sources and echoes, interprets its highly experimental writing and explains the work’s great significance for twentieth-century literature. It offers a clear pathway into this remarkable bilingual novel, identifying Beckett’s use of previously unknown sources in the history of Western philosophy, from the ancient and modern periods, and challenging critical orthodoxies. Through careful archival scholarship and attention to the dynamics of self-translation, the book traces Beckett’s transformation of his narrator’s ‘ancient voice’, his intellectual heritage, into a mode of aesthetic representation that offers the means to think beyond intractable paradoxes of philosophy. This shift in the work’s relation to tradition marks a hiatus in literary modernism, a watershed moment whose deep and enduring significance may now be appreciated.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
List of Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	vi
Series Editor’s Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
List of Abbreviations Publicly Available Download PDF	viii
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1 A Poetics of Translation: Dante, Goethe and the Paideia Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	16
2 Pythagorean Mysticism / Democritean Wisdom Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	44
3 The Physical Cosmos: Aristotelian Dialectics Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	76
4 From the Cradle to the Cave: A Comedy of Ethics from Plato to Christian Asceticism (via Rembrandt) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	110
5 Mystic Paths, Inward Turns Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	138
6 Pascal’s Miraculous Tongue Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	194
7 Spinoza, Leibniz or a World ‘less exquisitely organized’ Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	220
Acknowledgements Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	265
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	267
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	286

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 304
Keywords: Literary Studies

eBook

Published: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 9781474440622