In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The New Samuel Beckett Studies ed. by Jean-Michel Rabaté
  • Stanton B. Garner Jr.
jean-michel rabaté, ed. The New Samuel Beckett Studies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. x + 269. $99.99 (Hb).

During the second decade of the twenty-first century, the field of Samuel Beckett studies underwent a transformation that has profoundly changed how we think about the writer and his work. As Jean-Michel Rabaté notes [End Page 512] in his introduction to this important collection of essays, a textual revolution has taken place that dramatically expands the Beckettian corpus and provides new ways of approaching and analysing previously known works. The four-volume edition of Beckett’s letters provided us with a trove of information on Beckett’s relationships and interests, while the discovery of unpublished notes and manuscripts has vastly enriched our understanding of his compositional process. In addition, the ongoing digitalization of this material as part of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP) allows scholars to map the complex evolution of the writer’s work. Scholars who are interested in Beckett’s reading now have access to his entire library and to his marks and annotations in individual books.

The New Samuel Beckett Studies surveys this evolving corpus and the critical approaches that have evolved to take account of it. Its contributors include scholars who have led the textual revolution and others whose critical work takes advantage of the newly available terrain this revolution has brought into view. In the book’s opening section, “The Expanded Canon,” Dirk Van Hulle, one of BDMP’s directors, points out that the digitalization of Beckett’s writings provides a major tool for genetic criticism – that is, the study of written invention and creative processes. The insights generated by “digital poetics” (22) apply not only to individual texts – such as The Unnamable (1953), one of the works currently available in the database – but also to changes in Beckett’s compositional method over the course of his career. Mark Nixon, van Hulle’s co-director on the project, analyses the multiple versions of what eventually became All Strange Away (1976) to illustrate the fragile distinction among drafts, abandoned texts, and so-called final texts in Beckett’s corpus. Beckett, he suggests, “inscribes the tension between textual completion and failure in the compositional process itself” (36). Dan Gunn, one of the editors of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, provides an overview of the decades-long project and assesses the place of the letters in Beckett’s oeuvre. Finally, Marjorie Perloff considers the evolution of Beckett’s poetry in light of the 2012 publication of Collected Poems, which included previously unavailable drafts, unpublished texts, and translations into different languages.

The remaining chapters showcase some of the important critical conversations in Beckett studies today. Longstanding and new debates are informed by the wealth of additional resources that today’s critics have at their disposal. In the section “New Contexts and Intertexts,” Emilie Morin draws upon the manuscripts, letters, and diaries to reinforce our growing understanding of Beckett’s engagement with history and contemporary events. Focusing on the motifs of internment, starvation, and forced labour, Morin argues that Beckett’s work “articulates its own sense of history precisely as it dismisses the very possibility of historical narrative” (103). Judith Wilkinson also looks [End Page 513] at Beckett’s responsiveness to the twentieth century though the lens of art and contemporary media. Beckett, who was highly knowledgeable about the media technologies he employed, worked across multiple platforms in the latter half of his career in ways that align his interests with those of his artistic contemporaries. Artists such as Miroslaw Balka and Jenny Holzer, whom Wilkinson discusses, have responded to Beckett’s multimedia achievements in works of their own. Chapters by Llewellyn Brown and John Bolin in this section consider Beckett’s radio drama and the influence of André Gide on Beckett’s critique of literature.

In the final section, “New Hermeneutic Codes,” Baylee Brits offers a fascinating discussion of Beckett and mathematics. Arguing for a connection between numbers and affective states in texts such as Molloy (1951), Brits proposes that “Beckett’s recourse to pure mathematics offers something genuinely...

pdf

Share