Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature addresses the relevance of terror to understanding the violence, the suffering, and the pain experienced by the narrative voices of Beckett's major post-1945 works in prose: The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing, How It Is, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho. Through a sustained dialogue with the theoretical work of Maurice Blanchot, it accomplishes a systematic interrogation of what happens in the space of literature when writing, and first of all Beckett's, encounters the language of terror, thereby giving new significance - ethical, ontological, and political - to what speaks in Beckett's texts.a a

Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature addresses the relevance of terror to understanding the violence, the suffering, and the pain experienced by the narrative voices of Beckett's major post-1945 works in prose: The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing, How It Is, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho. Through a sustained dialogue with the theoretical work of Maurice Blanchot, it accomplishes a systematic interrogation of what happens in the space of literature when writing, and first of all Beckett's, encounters the language of terror, thereby giving new significance - ethical, ontological, and political - to what speaks in Beckett's texts.a a

“On Beckett: Essays and Criticism” is the first collection of writings about the Nobel Prize–winning author that covers the entire spectrum of his work, and also affords a rare glimpse of the private Beckett. More has been written about Samuel Beckett than about any other writer of this century – countless books and articles dealing with him are in print, and the progression continues geometrically. “On Beckett” brings together some of the most perceptive writings from the vast amount of scrutiny that has been lavished on the man; in addition to widely read essays there are contributions from more obscure sources, viewpoints not frequently seen. Together they allow the reader to enter the world of a writer whose work has left an impact on the consciousness of our time perhaps unmatched by that of any other recent creative imagination.

Offering a striking new interpretation of Beckett's major fiction, Chronicles of Disorder demonstrates how Beckett's career as a writer developed in relation to the most enduring twentieth-century beliefs about the social function of literature, language, and narrative. Weisberg explores Beckett's emergence as a major novelist and intertwines sharp analyses of the relations between narrative form and social content in the key works of the Beckett canon. He considers how and why Beckett's work has become ahistorically—and incorrectly—subsumed into poststructuralist-inspired claims about language and narrative ideology, and he uses Beckett as a case study for tracing out the genesis of the opposition of "autonomous" and "committed" art, and how this opposition influenced the canonization of modernism in the 1950s and 1960s.

This volume brings together three of Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett’s major short stories and thirteen shorter pieces of fiction that he calls “texts for nothing.” Here, as in all his work, Beckett relentlessly strips away all but the essential to arrive at a core of truth. His prose reveals the same mastery that marks his work from Waiting for Godot and Endgame to Molloy and Malone Dies. In each of the three stories, old men displaced or expelled from the modest corners where they have been living bestir themselves in search of new corners. Told, “You can’t stay here,” they somehow, doggedly, inevitably, go on. Includes: “The Expelled” “The Calmative” “The End” Texts for Nothing (1-10)

Arguing that Beckett's understanding of subjectivity cannot be reduced to that of phenomenology or existential humanism, Thomas Trezise offers a major reinterpretation of Beckett in light of Freud and such post-modernists as Bataille, Blanchot, and Derrida. Through extended comparisons of Beckett's trilogy of novels with the writings of these thinkers, he emphasizes a "general economy" of signification that both produces and dispossesses the phenomenological self. Trezise shows how Beckett's work defines literature as an instance within this economy and in so doing challenges traditional conceptions of literature itself and of the subject. The undoing of historical time in an abyssal repetition, the involvement of the subject with an impersonal alterity, the priority of error, the understanding of art as an inspired failure--at once an impossibility and an imperative rather than an act of freedom and power--all underscore Beckett's contribution to a form of thought radically irreducible to phenomenology as well as to existential humanism. Trezise suggests that Beckett's own literary corpus be considered an exploration of the breach that this artistic failure opens in traditional philosophical approaches to the human subject. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Beckett's Political Imagination uncovers Beckett's lifelong engagement with political thought and political history, showing how this concern informed his work as fiction author, dramatist, critic and translator. This radically new account will appeal to students, researchers and Beckett lovers alike.