Abstract
Beckett is the poet of the poststructuralist age. In his plays, as in all his work, we are offered something like a version of the world according to Derrida. Where Beckett has already given up the search for determinable meaning, in the 1940s and 1950s, as a vain pursuit, poststructuralism would proclaim, in the 1960s and 1970s, the ultimately undecidable nature of meaning, and would celebrate meaninglessness as an objective correlative for a new vision of the world.
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Notes
Brian Finney, Since How It Is: A Study of Samuel Beckett’s Later Fiction (London: Covent Garden Press, 1972) p. 10.
See Michael Haerdter, Materialen zu Becketts Endspiel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967) p. 88.
This essay is now collected in Ruby Cohn (ed.), Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment by Samuel Beckett (London: John Calder, 1983) pp. 19–34.
See, for instance, David Hesla, The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel Beckett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971)
and Lance St John Butler, Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being: A Study in Ontological Parable (London: Macmillan, 1984).
Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, was delivered as a lecture at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA, in French in October 1966.
It is available in English in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) pp. 278–93.
Samuel Beckett, Watt (London: John Calder, 1963) p. 127.
R. Thomas Simone, ‘Beckett’s Other Trilogy: Not I, Footfalls and Rockaby’, in Robin J. Davis and Lance St John Butler (eds), ‘Make Sense Who May’: Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Later Works (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988) pp. 56–65.
See Enoch Brater, ‘Dada, Surrealism and the Genesis of Not I’, Modern Drama, vol. 18, no. 1 (1975) p. 53.
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Butler, L.S. (1994). Beckett’s Stage of Deconstruction. In: Docherty, B. (eds) Twentieth-Century European Drama. Insights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23073-0_5
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