Beckett and Aesthetics

As a young man, Beckett hoped that writing could provide psychic authenticity and true representation of the physical world; instead he found himself immersed in artificialities, self-enclosed word games. Daniel Albright argues that Beckett escaped from this bind by allegories of artistic frustration and through an art of non-representation and estrangement. Albright shows Beckett experimenting with the notion that an artistic medium might itself be made to speak. Engaging with radio,...
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As a young man, Beckett hoped that writing could provide psychic authenticity and true representation of the physical world; instead he found himself immersed in artificialities, self-enclosed word games. Daniel Albright argues that Beckett escaped from this bind by allegories of artistic frustration and through an art of non-representation and estrangement. Albright shows Beckett experimenting with the notion that an artistic medium might itself be made to speak. Engaging with radio, film, and television, prose and drama, Albright's Beckett becomes a sophisticated theorist of the very notion of the aesthetic.