Beckett's Late Stage

Trauma, Language, and Subjectivity

Fiction & Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, Drama History & Criticism

• Author: Rhys Tranter
• ISBN: 9783838270357
• Publisher: Ibidem Press
• Publication: February 27, 2018
• Imprint: Ibidem Press
• Language: English

Beckett's Late Stage reexamines the Nobel laureate's postwar prose and drama in the light of contemporary trauma theory. Through a series of sustained close readings, the study demonstrates how the comings and goings of Beckett's prose unsettles the Western philosophical tradition; it reveals how Beckett's live theatrical productions are haunted by the rehearsal of traumatic repetition, and asks what his ghostly radio recordings might signal for twentieth-century modernity. Drawing from psychoanalytic and poststructuralist traditions, Beckett's Late Stage explores how the traumatic symptom allows us to rethink the relationship between language, meaning, and identity after 1945.