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Two-Part Invention: Voices from Augustine’s The Teacher and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame
- Philosophy and Literature
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 40, Number 2, October 2016
- pp. 480-494
- 10.1353/phl.2016.0032
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
Augustine’s The Teacher and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame both depict father-son conversations characterized by similarly strange and self-conscious uses of language. Each father offers his son linguistic guidance of an odd sort. However, the oddity of the offering is not without a point. Drawing on Stanley Cavell’s reading of Endgame, I explain the theological and philosophical motivations for the educations. I suggest Confessions book 9 may illuminate Augustine’s notion of the interior teacher, and I show how the forgotten mothers who haunt Augustine’s and Beckett’s texts offer resources for a richer account of language than that ostensibly offered by the fathers.