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 BECKETT AND MODERNISM

EDITED BY OLGA BELOBORODOVA,

DIRK VAN HULLE AND PIM VERHULST

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN MODERN EUROPEAN LITERATURE

 Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature

Series Editors
Shane Weller
School of European Culture and Languages
University of Kent
Canterbury, UK

Thomas Baldwin
Centre for Modern European Literature
University of Kent
Canterbury, UK

Ben Hutchinson
Centre for Modern European Literature
University of Kent
Canterbury, UK

“Beckett and Modernism performs a fundamental and wide-ranging reappraisal of

Beckett’s place in the discourse of Modernism, rethinking his aesthetic and ethical
commitments and the modes by which he expressed them. Deploying recent con-
troversies of periodization and Beckett’s placement within various iterations of
Modernism (High, Late, Belated, Post, and combinations thereof), this collection
makes an integrated, compelling case for Beckett Studies as an extended critical
intervention in such debate.”
—Mark Byron, University of Sydney, Australia
Linked to the Centre for Modern European Literature at the University of
Kent, UK, this series offers a space for new research that challenges the
limitations of national, linguistic and cultural borders within Europe and
engages in the comparative study of literary traditions in the modern
period.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14610
 Olga Beloborodova
Dirk Van Hulle • Pim Verhulst
Editors

Beckett and
Modernism
Editors
Olga Beloborodova Dirk Van Hulle
University of Antwerp University of Antwerp
Antwerp, Belgium Antwerp, Belgium

Pim Verhulst
University of Antwerp
Antwerp, Belgium

Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature

ISBN 978-3-319-70373-2    ISBN 978-3-319-70374-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70374-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017960185

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
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 Acknowledgements

First of all, we would like to thank all the contributors to the second
annual conference of the Samuel Beckett Society (exploring the theme of
Beckett and modernism), which took place at the University of Antwerp
from 27 to 30 April 2016. The present volume is the result of the many
fruitful discussions that were held during this event and the chapters were
carefully commissioned to cover a broad spectrum of time, authors, and
topics with respect to Beckett and modernism. In particular, we are grate-
ful to Edward Beckett for attending the conference and for endorsing the
project.
We would also like to extend our thanks to Fordham University Press,
New York, for their kind permission to quote from Jean-Michel Rabaté’s
2016 book Think, Pig! Beckett at the Limit of the Human in his chapter,
and to the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow for their
permission to quote letters from Nancy Cunard and Robert Herring to
Sergei Eisenstein in the chapter by Galina Kiryushina, and to include a
facsimile of Samuel Beckett’s letter to Sergei Eisenstein as a frontispiece to
her chapter.
Lastly, we would like to acknowledge the University of Antwerp’s sup-
port of this publication with a TOPBOF grant for the project entitled
‘Literature and the Extended Mind: A Reassessment of Modernism’. The
research leading to these results has also received funding from the
European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh
Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no.
313609.

v
 Contents

Introduction
Negative Modernism: Beckett’s Poetics of Pejorism and
Literary Enactment   1
Dirk Van Hulle

 ow Beckett Has Modified Modernism: From Beckett

H
to Blanchot and Bataille  19
Jean-Michel Rabaté

 rom Language Revolution to Literature of the Unword:

F
Beckett as Late Modernist  37
Shane Weller

 ate and Belated Modernism: Duchamp…Stein.Feininger..

L
Beckett  53
Conor Carville

 eckett and Joyce: Two Nattering Nabobs of Negativity  69

B
Sam Slote

vii
viii Contents

 eckett, Lewis, Joyce: Reading Dream of Fair to Middling

B
Women through The Apes of God and Ulysses  81
José Francisco Fernández

‘Omniscience and omnipotence’: Molloy and the End

of ‘Joyceology’  95
Andy Wimbush

‘A new occasion, a new term of relation’: Samuel Beckett

and T. S. Eliot 111
William Davies

‘The gantelope of sense and nonsense run’: Echo’s Bones

and Other Precipitates in the 1930s 129
Onno Kosters

 chenectady Putters and Leaving Certificate Ta-Tas:

S
Satirizing Irish Nation-Building in ‘Echo’s Bones’ 147
Feargal Whelan

 amuel Beckett’s ‘Le Concentrisme’ and the Modernist

S
Literary Hoax 161
Paul Fagan

 heoretical and Theatrical Intersections: Samuel Beckett,

T
Herbert Blau, Civil Rights, and the Politics of Godot 179
S. E. Gontarski

 amuel Beckett and Modern Dance 193

S
Evelyne Clavier

‘Execrations on another plane’: Film Theory in Close Up

and Beckett’s Late Prose 209
Galina Kiryushina
 Contents 
   ix

‘Temporarily sane’: Beckett, Modernism, and the Ethics

of Suicide 223
Ulrika Maude

 roadcasting the Mind: Extended Cognition in Beckett’s

B
Radio Plays 239
Olga Beloborodova and Pim Verhulst

References 259

Index 283
 Notes on Contributors

Olga Beloborodova is finishing her PhD at the University of Antwerp

and is currently working at its Centre for Manuscript Genetics. Her PhD
research involves the study of Samuel Beckett’s writing process by means
of genetic manuscript analysis, as well as the evocations of fictional minds
in his prose and drama, both according to the paradigm of extended cog-
nition. Her monograph The Making of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Play’ / ‘Film’ is
forthcoming with UPA/Bloomsbury (2019).
Conor Carville is Associate Professor of English at Reading University.
His book on Irish cultural theory, The Ends of Ireland: Criticism, History,
Subjectivity, was published by Manchester University Press in 2012. He
has published many essays on Beckett, most recently ‘Murphy’s
Thanatopolitics’ in the Irish Review. His book on Beckett and the Visual is
forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
Evelyne Clavier teaches at a high school in Paris and she is also writing a
doctoral dissertation at the University of Bordeaux under the supervision
of Pascale Sardin. She studies the links between Samuel Beckett’s works
and dance through embodiment and performance. Her other experience
includes working on a pedagogical project entitled Meeting Beckett, and
on a performance based upon Beckett’s last poem Comment dire/What is
the Word.
William Davies is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Reading.
His thesis examines the impacts and traces of the Second World War in
Samuel Beckett’s writing. He has co-organized two international

xi
xii Notes on Contributors

c­ onferences at Reading: ‘Beckett and Europe’ (2015) and ‘Beckett and

Politics’ (2016). He was awarded a Dissertation Fellowship by the Harry
Ransom Center (2016) and is the University of Reading’s Heritage &
Creativity Researcher of the Year (2017). He is also co-editor of the forth-
coming collection of essays Beckett and Europe: History, Culture, Tradition.
Paul Fagan is Lecturer at the University of Vienna and Senior Scientist at
Salzburg University. He is the co-founder of the International Flann
O’Brien Society and series editor of its journal The Parish Review. He co-­
edited Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies (Irish Times top ten non-fiction
books 2014) with Ruben Borg and Werner Huber, and Flann O’Brien:
Problems with Authority with Borg and John McCourt. He is currently
completing a monograph on the Irish literary hoax.
José Francisco Fernández is Senior Lecturer in English literature at the
University of Almería, Spain. His most recent work focuses on the narra-
tive of Samuel Beckett and his reception in Spain, including ‘Surrounding
the Void: Samuel Beckett and Spain’ (2014), and ‘Minister of Horses:
Samuel Beckett according to Fernando Arrabal’ (2015). He has also trans-
lated into Spanish two novels and one collection of short stories by Samuel
Beckett. He is general editor of the journal Estudios Irlandeses.
S.E. Gontarski is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor at Florida
State University. With Paul Ardoin and Laci Mattison he has recently pub-
lished Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury,
2013). Gontarski has edited The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett
and the Arts (2014) for Edinburgh University Press, which also published
his monographs Beckett Matters: Essays on Beckett’s Late Modernism (2016)
and Creative Involution: Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze (2015), launching the
book series ‘Other Becketts’. His Revisioning Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s
Decadent Turn is scheduled from Bloomsbury in March 2018.
Galina Kiryushina is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Irish Studies,
Faculty of Arts, Charles University Prague. Her dissertation explores
cross-media transitions in Beckett’s late work, with emphasis on the visual
forms of film and television. Her research on Beckett, Eisenstein, and the
cinema has previously appeared in Tradition and Modernity: New Essays in
Irish Studies.
Onno Kosters is Assistant Professor of English literature and translation
at Utrecht University. His teaching and research cover eighteenth,
 Notes on Contributors 
   xiii

­ ineteenth and twentieth-century poetry, modernist writing, and (liter-

n
ary) translation. Authors of note in his research and teaching are James
Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney. He wrote his doctoral dis-
sertation on Joyce (Ending in Progress, 1999). He was the director of ‘a
long the krommerun’: the XXIV International James Joyce Symposium,
Utrecht, June 2014, and the co-editor of selected papers from that confer-
ence (Brill, 2016).
Ulrika Maude is Reader in Modernism and Twentieth-Century
Literature at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Beckett,
Technology and the Body (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Samuel
Beckett and Medicine (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She is co-­editor
of a number of volumes, including Beckett and Phenomenology (Continuum,
2009) and The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature (Cambridge
University Press, 2015). She is also a member of the editorial board of the
Journal of Beckett Studies.
Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature
at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the editors of the Journal
of Modern Literature, a co-founder and senior curator of Slought
Foundation, Philadelphia, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences. Recent publications include The Pathos of Distance (2016),
Think, Pig! (2016), and Les Guerres de Jacques Derrida (2016).
Forthcoming is the book Rust (2018).
Sam Slote is Associate Professor in the School of English at Trinity
College Dublin. His most recent book is Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics. In
addition to Joyce and Beckett, he has written on Virginia Woolf, Vladimir
Nabokov, Raymond Queneau, Dante, Mallarmé, and Elvis.
Dirk Van Hulle is professor of English literature at the University of
Antwerp and director of the Centre for Manuscript Genetics. With Mark
Nixon, he is co-director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.
beckettarchive.org) and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Beckett Studies. His
publications include Modern Manuscripts (2014), Samuel Beckett’s Library
(2013, with Mark Nixon), James Joyce’s Work in Progress (2016) and several
genetic editions in the BDMP, including Krapp’s Last Tape / La Dernière
Bande, En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot (with Pim Verhulst),
L’Innommable / The Unnamable and Fin de partie / Endgame (with Shane
Weller) and the Beckett Digital Library. He has also edited The New
Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (2015).
xiv Notes on Contributors

Pim Verhulst is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp’s

Centre for Manuscript Genetics. He has published on Beckett’s radio
plays in SBT/A, JOBS, Variants, Genetic Joyce Studies, and Samuel Beckett
and BBC Radio (Palgrave, 2017). He is assistant editor of JOBS and edi-
torial board member of the BDMP, for which he co-edited and co-­
authored the modules on Molloy and Malone meurt / Malone Dies (with
Dirk Van Hulle and Magessa O’Reilly) and En attendant Godot / Waiting
for Godot (with Dirk Van Hulle). His monograph The Making of Samuel
Beckett’s Radio Plays is forthcoming with UPA/Bloomsbury (2019).
Shane Weller is Professor of Comparative Literature and co-director of
the Centre for Modern European Literature at the University of Kent. His
publications include Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity (2006),
Modernism and Nihilism (2011), and The Making of Samuel Beckett’s
‘L’Innommable’/‘The Unnamable’ (2014), co-authored with Dirk Van
Hulle.
Feargal Whelan has published and presented widely on the works of
Beckett and on Irish theatre of the mid-twentieth century. He co-founded
the series of international conferences ‘Samuel Beckett and the “State” of
Ireland’ which ran annually from 2011 to 2013, and has been involved
with the Samuel Beckett Summer School at TCD since its inception in
2011. He edits The Beckett Circle and is an associate researcher at UCD
Humanities Institute in Dublin.
Andy Wimbush holds a BA and a PhD in English Literature from the
University of Cambridge. He has published essays on Samuel Beckett’s
work and its relationship to religion, mysticism, modernism, aesthetics,
ecology, and philosophy in The Journal of Beckett Studies, Literature and
Theology, and various academic books. He teaches twentieth-century and
contemporary literature at the Institute of Continuing Education,
University of Cambridge.
 List of Abbreviations

ATF All That Fall and Other Plays for Radio and Screen, pref. Everett
Frost (London: Faber & Faber, 2009)
BDL Beckett Digital Library: A Digital Genetic Edition, ed. Dirk Van
Hulle, Mark Nixon, Vincent Neyt, and Veronica Bălă (Brussels:
University Press Antwerp, 2016). The Beckett Digital
Manuscript Project, http://www.beckettarchive.org
BDMP The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, ed. Dirk Van Hulle, Mark
Nixon, and Vincent Neyt. http://www.beckettarchive.org
CIWS Company/Ill Seen Ill said/Worstward Ho/Stirrings Still, ed.
Dirk Van Hulle (London: Faber & Faber, 2009)
CP The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett, ed. John Pilling and Seán
Lawlor (London: Faber & Faber, 2012)
CSP The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New
York: Grove Press, 1995)
D Dream of Fair to Middling Women, ed. Eoin O’Brien and Edith
Fournier (Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1992)
Dis Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed.
Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984)
DN Beckett’s ‘Dream’ Notebook, ed. John Pilling (Reading: Beckett
International Foundation, 1999)
E Endgame, pref. Rónán McDonald (London: Faber & Faber,
2009)
EB Echo’s Bones, ed. Mark Nixon (London: Faber & Faber, 2014)
HD Happy Days, pref. James Knowlson (London: Faber & Faber,
2010)

xv
xvi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

HII How It Is, ed. Édouard Magessa O’Reilly (London: Faber &
Faber, 2009)
KLT Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Shorter Plays, pref. S. E. Gontarski
(London: Faber & Faber, 2009)
LSB I The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. I, 1929–1940, ed. Martha
Dow Fehsenfeld, and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009)
LSB II The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. II, 1941–1956, ed. George
Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More
Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)
LSB III The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. III, 1957–1965, ed. George
Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More
Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)
LSB IV The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. IV, 1966–1989, ed. George
Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More
Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)
MD Malone Dies, ed. Peter Boxall (London: Faber & Faber, 2010)
Mo Molloy, ed. Shane Weller (London: Faber & Faber, 2009)
MPTK More Pricks Than Kicks, ed. Cassandra Nelson (London: Faber
& Faber, 2010)
Mu Murphy, ed. J. C. C. Mays (London: Faber & Faber, 2009)
PTD Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: John
Calder, 1965)
TFN Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose 1950–1976, ed. Mark
Nixon (London: Faber & Faber, 2010)
TN2 Endgame: The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, vol. 2, ed.
S. E. Gontarski (London: Faber & Faber, 1992)
Un The Unnamable, ed. Steven Connor (London: Faber & Faber,
2010)
W Watt, ed. C. J. Ackerley (London: Faber & Faber, 2009)
WFG Waiting for Godot, pref. Mary Bryden (London: Faber & Faber,
2010)
 Introduction
Negative Modernism: Beckett’s Poetics of
Pejorism and Literary Enactment

Dirk Van Hulle

Samuel Beckett has been referred to as ‘The Last Modernist’ (Cronin

1996), but he has also been situated within the postmodern canon and
was recently even called a ‘postmodern icon’ (Murphy and Pawliuk 2016).
The opening paragraph of the Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern
Fiction opens with Beckett’s work as prototypical of postmodernist imagi-
native writing, which ‘doesn’t go down easily’ and ‘presents a challenge to
the reader’ (Nicol 2009: xiii–xiv). But equal prominence is given to
Beckett in the ‘Introduction’ to Peter Childs’s Modernism in Routledge’s
New Critical Idiom series, where the opening paragraphs of Murphy are
quoted to ‘plunge into a fictional narrative, and discuss what is going on
at the start of a Modernist text’ (2017: 6). Childs sees this novel as an
‘exemplary’ modernist novel, but he also notes that it ‘would actually be
sidelined by some definitions of modernism and by some overviews of
modernist writers’ (6). That Samuel Beckett is sometimes called a mod-
ernist and sometimes a postmodernist is not new, but that of all twentieth-­
century writers it is Beckett who is referred to as paradigmatic of both

D. Van Hulle (*)

University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

© The Author(s) 2018 1

O. Beloborodova et al. (eds.), Beckett and Modernism,
Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70374-9_1
2 D. VAN HULLE

modernism and postmodernism suggests that his connection with mod-

ernism requires further scrutiny.
As Susan Stanford Friedman noted in 2001, an interesting shift occurred
in the semantics of the term ‘modernism’ in the final decades of the twen-
tieth century: whereas it stood for rebellion and rupture in the 1960s it
came to signify elitism, the establishment, ‘high culture’, or ‘the authori-
tarian target of emancipatory postmodernism’ in the 1990s (5–6). In the
last period, Samuel Beckett was often regarded as a typical exponent of
postmodernism. In a landmark publication on this period (Constructing
Postmodernism, 1992), Brian McHale suggested a transition from mod-
ernism to postmodernism that was marked by ‘the distinction between the
cognitivist and the postcognitivist Beckett’ (34), that is ‘the Beckett who
is still preoccupied with modernist issues of reliability and unreliability of
narrators, radical subjectivity, and multiplicity of perspectives, as in Watt
and Molloy’ (34) and ‘the Beckett who focuses instead on the status of
fictional worlds, the power (and impotence) of language to make and
unmake worlds, and the relationship between fictional being and elusive
“real” being, as in Malone Dies, The Unnamable, and many of the later
short texts’ (34).
Still, Beckett was not unequivocally presented as an exponent of post-
modernism. McHale also suggested that ‘Beckett qualifies for member-
ship in the late-modernist category’ (1992: 28). In Around the Absurd:
Essays on Modern and Post-Modern Drama (1990) H. Porter Abbott, too,
presented Beckett as a representative of ‘late modernism’, and for Tyrus
Miller ‘Beckett’s writings of the 1940s and early fifties constitute a pivotal
perspective on the literary evolution of late modernism at mid-century’
(2006: 147). As a result, his work is ‘neither understandable outside of the
themes and technical methods of modernism nor fully identifiable with
them’ (152). Indeed, the term ‘late modernism’ seems to be gaining cur-
rency in Beckett studies today (see for instance the contribution by Shane
Weller in this volume), now that postmodernism ‘has receded into the
historical past’, as Wang Ning observes in ‘Historicizing Postmodernist
Fiction’ (2013: 265).1 Against the background of the ‘waning, if not yet
obsolescent critical paradigm’ of postmodernism, Rónán McDonald and
Julian Murphet speak of an ‘extraordinary reinvention of modernism tak-
ing place today’ (Murphet et al. 2014: 4), sometimes referred to as ‘new
modernist studies’ (3), which ‘resist singular ideas of modernism’ (3).
At the same time, several critics have called into question not only the
criteria underlying these labels but also the act of categorization itself, the
danger being in ‘the neatness of identifications’, as Beckett warned his
 NEGATIVE MODERNISM 3

readers from the start in his essay ‘Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce’ (Dis 19).

Before we investigate Beckett’s relationship with modernism in this vol-
ume, it is useful to take a step back and explore the philosophical prehis-
tory of what could be termed Beckett’s negative modernism. This
introduction first retraces the prehistory of this negative modernism by
starting from (1) ‘epiphanic’ modernism. It then traces the contours of (2)
Beckett’s poetics of ‘pejorism’, to examine (3) how his negative modern-
ism is enacted in his works and how this study of Beckett’s relation to
modernism can be paradigmatic of the current study of (4) ‘modernism
after postmodernism’.

Before and After Epiphanic Modernism:

Tombeau de Leibniz
When Beckett opened his first published essay with the sentence ‘The
danger is in the neatness of identifications’ (Dis 19), he was analysing the
late work of a central figure in literary modernism. James Joyce’s work at
that moment was ‘progressing’ from the last word of Ulysses (1922): ‘yes’.
This final ‘yes’ is more ambivalent than it may seem at first sight (see Sam
Slote’s contribution to this volume). Taken at face value, the modernist
‘yes’ could stand for an affirmative ‘Yes to life’ after Nietzsche’s proclama-
tion of God’s death—which was followed by the question how we were
going to comfort ourselves after this murder: ‘Gott ist todt! Gott bleibt
todt! Und wir haben ihn getödtet! Wie trösten wir uns, die Mörder aller
Mörder?’ [God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How
shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?] (Nietzsche
1980, vol. 3: 480).2
The resulting sense of loss also implied a loss of faith in words. Beckett
was certainly not the only writer who felt the modernist state of crisis most
acutely through language. Several poets and writers had the feeling that
once evocative words had become either ‘abstracted to death’ (Dis 28) or
overdetermined and worn out. As Gertrude Stein noted, the poets of the
past were ‘drunk with nouns’ (1998: 328) and believed that the noun was
still present as ‘the name in origin’ (1975: 145); ‘when language was new
[…] the poet could use the name of a thing and the thing was really there’
(2004: 7).3 Now that the connection between word and object was dis-
puted, however, Stein tried to find ‘a way of naming things that would not
invent names, but mean names without naming them’ (1998: 330; see
Nugent-Folan 2013). Beckett similarly struggled with naming and
4 D. VAN HULLE

unnamability. Whereas, in the Book of Genesis, Adam could still feel enti-
tled to simply give names to things, Beckett’s character Watt is no longer
able to comfort himself with the belief that the word ‘pot’ was the right
word for Mr Knott’s pot: ‘It resembled a pot, it was almost a pot, but it
was not a pot of which one could say, Pot, pot, and be comforted’ (W 95).
In the absence of any answer to Nietzsche’s question ‘How shall we
comfort ourselves?’, some writers started discrediting received language
through language and disrupting semantic certainty; others resorted to
intertextuality. One form of modernist comfort is contained in the inter-
textual leitmotif ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’ in Virginia Woolf’s
Mrs. Dalloway (1925). On the one hand, the line from the dirge in
Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (IV.2) is comforting in the most direct way to
the suicidal character Septimus Smith; on the other hand, it is also his
surviving counterpart, Clarissa Dalloway, who needs comforting. She finds
comfort in ‘moments of being’, for instance when Clarissa remembers
how, ‘for a moment’, she felt ‘what men felt’ when ‘she could not resist
sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman’:

It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and
then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest
verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some
astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin
and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and
sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning
in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. (2015: 29; emphasis added)

This moment, which Peter Childs describes as a ‘spreading emotional

orgasm’ (2017: 177), is called a ‘revelation’ and a ‘religious feeling’ by
Woolf herself (2015: 32). Although these ‘moments of being’ are usually
more physical than for instance the spiritual insights James Joyce referred
to as ‘epiphanies’, it is interesting that both Woolf and Joyce directly or
indirectly relate the experience of sudden and striking realization to religion
(the term epiphany originally referred to enlightening insight through the
divine). After Nietzsche’s proclamation of God’s death and the disintegra-
tion of nineteenth-century structures, many modernists seem to have felt
not only a loss but also a need to find a surrogate to fill the gap, not neces-
sarily by creating a complete esoteric system of their own, such as Yeats’s,
but still by suggesting both the existence of some ‘inner meaning almost
expressed’, and the possibility to reach or approximate it through art.
 NEGATIVE MODERNISM 5

Proust’s equivalent of Woolf’s ‘moments’ were instances of ‘involuntary

memory’, which Beckett marked in his copy of À la recherche du temps
perdu (1913–27) as ‘Rev’ or moments of revelation.4 As he rightly pointed
out in his essay Proust, this modernist aesthetic was to a large extent inspired
by Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy and the notion of the Will, which
‘objectifies’ itself in the empirical world, marked by time, space, and causal-
ity: ‘to every grade of the Will’s objectification, there corresponds a time-
less archetype, a Platonic eternal form, in short: a Platonic Idea’ (Pothast
2008: 33). The key element that made Schopenhauer’s philosophy so
attractive to many modernist writers was the suggestion that the artist can
gain access to, and knowledge of, these so-called Ideas: ‘The visionary,
artistic knowledge of Ideas according to Schopenhauer is entirely a matter
of intuition (“Anschauung”)’ (39). And of all the arts, music provided the
richest metaphysical knowledge of what the world ‘truly’ is.5 By providing
access to this ‘deeper’ or ‘higher’ reality beyond the ­phenomenal world, art
would—according to Schopenhauer—be able to momentarily tear apart
the ‘veil of Maya’, ‘the epitome of all illusions’ (70).
Schopenhauer’s idealist aesthetic is remarkably optimistic in compari-
son with his otherwise pessimistic view. Against Leibniz’s overoptimistic
worldview that this would be the best of all possible worlds, Schopenhauer
argued that it was actually the worst of all possible worlds.6 Leibniz’s theo-
dicy,7 satirized by Voltaire in Candide, ou l’optimisme (1759), was seri-
ously challenged by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which is evoked in
Beckett’s poem ‘ainsi a-t-on beau’ (1938):

ainsi a-t-on beau

par le beau temps et par le mauvais
enfermé chez soi enfermé chez eux
comme si c’était d’hier se rappeler le mammouth
le dinothérium les premiers baisers
les périodes glaciaires n’apportant rien de neuf
la grande chaleur du treizième de leur ère
sur Lisbonne fumante Kant froidement penché
rêver en générations de chênes et oublier son père
ses yeux s’il portrait la moustache
s’il était bon de quoi il est mort (CP 98)

As Lawrence E. Harvey paraphrases, ‘It is vain to recall bygone ages, sum-

moning them into an eternal present, and likewise unimportant, for the
6 D. VAN HULLE

immediate past slips irretrievably away’ (1970: 210). While the ­phrasing of
the poem is based on words cogged from Fritz Mauthner,8 the panoramic
historical perspective is Hegelian in scope. One could read the last part of
the opening line (‘[…] -t-on beau’) as a ‘tombeau’ in the sense of the
musical genre of that name, a composition commemorating the death of a
notable predecessor. As a ‘Tombeau de Kant, Hegel et Leibniz’ it puts to
rest Kant’s ‘icy reason’, the dialectical idealism of Hegel’s philosophy of
history, and Leibniz’s theodicy. As opposed to Kant’s ‘icy reason’, Harvey
notes, ‘[t]he poet is obviously no cold philosophical analyst’ (1970: 209).
As for Leibniz: ‘The earthquake of Lisbon sufficed to cure Voltaire of the
theodicy of Leibniz’, as Adorno noted in the chapter ‘After Auschwitz’ in
his Negative Dialectics (1973: 361). And unlike Hegel’s optimistic identi-
fication of the divine ‘telos’ of history and the ‘totalizing logic inherent to
universal histories’ (Wolfe 2008), Beckett’s view was much closer to
Adorno’s ‘negative dialectics’ and his ‘logic of disintegration’ (Adorno
1973: 144),9 supplying what J. M. Bernstein calls ‘a ­negative theodicy’
(2001: 383)10 instead of the old Western tradition of affirmative meta-
physics and the rationalization of suffering.
Beckett criticized any rationalization and justification of suffering from
an early stage onward, as the ending of the story of ‘Dante and the Lobster’
already indicates when the rationalization of the lobster’s pain of being
boiled alive (‘it’s a quick death, God help us all’) is utterly denied: ‘It is
not’ (MPTK 14). After the war, this criticism of the theodicean belief in
the steady progress of humanity is further developed, even in fragments
that never made it into print. For instance, in the ‘Louis & Blanc’ frag-
ment,11 two men are being given a breath of fresh air by a guardian, but
their teeth have not been brushed, which Blanc thinks is an injustice. Blanc
concentrates on the body being aired, arguing that they should complain
(‘Il faut réclamer’); his alter ego, ‘Louis même’ (phonetically ‘lui-même’,
‘himself’), rationalizes the suffering and the feeling of injustice (qtd. in
Van Hulle 2015: 135). In his ‘German Diaries’, Beckett had already
touched upon this kind of rationalization with reference to history, when
he wrote ‘I can’t read history like a novel’: ‘I am not interested in a “uni-
fication” of the historical chaos any more than I am in the “clarification”
of the individual chaos, & still less in the anthropomorphisation of the
inhuman necessities that provoke the chaos’ (qtd. in Nixon 2011:
177–178). He was more interested in particulars like names, dates, and
other details than in ‘the modern animism that consists in rationalising
them’ (178), ‘the fashionable monde romancé that explains copious[ly]
 NEGATIVE MODERNISM 7

why e.g. Luther was inevitable without telling me anything about Luther’
(Beckett qtd. in McNaughton 2005: 107).
Not unlike the ‘Louis & Blanc’ fragment, ‘ainsi a-t-on beau’ reads as a
dramatic expression of Beckett’s view on this ‘anthropomorphisation’—an
ironic demonstration of the human mind’s tendency to rationalize injus-
tice and the theodicean faith in the universal progression of history. The
second half of the poem stresses the negative counterpoise to this optimis-
tic faith:

on n’en est pas moins mangé sans appétit

par le mauvais temps et par le pire
enfermé chez soi enfermé chez eux (CP 98)

It’s all well and good to remember (‘se rappeler’) the mammoth of times
immemorial, to dream (‘rêver’) in generations of oaks, and to forget
(‘oublier’) one’s father; one isn’t any less consumed by his death and one
is left behind with the feeling of being locked up (‘enfermé’)—possibly the
feeling of being entombed in the ‘tombeau’ of this theodicean way of
thinking (‘ainsi a-t-on beau […] se rappeler […] rêver […] oublier’), this
way of rationalizing suffering in the name of progress and imbuing every-
thing with purpose and meaning. In the end, one remains just as locked
up as in the beginning (‘enfermé chez soi enfermé chez eux’, repeated
verbatim), but the poem is not static: it moves from the good-weather
forecasts of Leibnizian and Hegelian worldviews and philosophies of his-
tory (‘le beau temps’) to bad weather (‘le mauvais temps’) and worse, even
the worst (‘le pire’). This poem already contains much of Beckett’s search
for the worst and worse as developed later, notably in Worstward Ho, on
the basis of such intertextual references as the lines ‘The worst is not / so
long as one can say, This is the worst’ from Shakespeare’s King Lear (IV.1)
and Petrarch’s ‘chi può dir com’egli arde, è ’n picciol foco’ [He who
knows he is burning is burning in a small fire].12 This search for the worst
and worse is part of Beckett’s poetics of pejorism.

Poetics of Pejorism: From Plümacher to Proust

Beckett’s poetics of pejorism is characterized by acts of linguistic pejora-
tion,13 by a ‘fidelity to failure’ (Dis 145), a sustained effort to question
the efficacy of language and challenge the certainty of meaning, the
asymptotic attempt at writing ‘worser’ (CIWS 97) and never reaching the
8 D. VAN HULLE

‘worst worst’ (95). There are at least two aspects to this poetics of
pejorism: (1) the quest for the worst and (2) the awareness of the impos-
sibility to say ‘this is the worst’.
(1) The quest for the worst is a journey toward ‘pessimum’. The term
‘pessimism’ was coined by Jesuit reviewers of Candide, ou l’optimisme,
Voltaire’s satirical response to Leibniz’s theodicy.14 But whereas ‘pessi-
mism’ is a static concept, stuck in the superlative ‘pessimum’, Beckett was
inspired to conceive of a more dynamic negative modernism by reading
Olga Plümacher’s book Der Pessimismus (1884). The opening paragraph
of the introduction defines pessimism as a philosophical system, founded
by Arthur Schopenhauer and developed by Eduard von Hartmann, on the
following principle: ‘die Summe der Unlust überwiegt die Summe der
Lust; folglich wäre das Nichtsein der Welt besser als deren Sein’ [the sum
total of pain exceeds the sum total of pleasure; as a consequence, the non-­
existence of the world would be better than its existence] (Plümacher
1888: 1). Beckett marked this definition with a pencil line in the margin
of his copy.15 To further explain the notion of pessimism, Plümacher refers
to Leibniz’s claim that this is the best of all possible worlds and notes, with
a remarkable metaphor, that this theodicy is hanging from the very thin
string of the religious dogma of an omniscient and omnipotent God/
creator.16 Even the most resolute optimists no longer deny the reality of
pain (Unlust) and their praise of the world is marked by a sense of ‘in spite
of everything’ (trotz alledem und alledem), which is why she suggests the
static superlative ‘Optimismus’ be replaced by the more dynamic compara-
tive ‘Meliorismus’ (1888: 2), the philosophy holding that, by interfering in
natural processes, human beings can bring about progress, that is, improve-
ments over the natural state of things. Beckett wrote the neologism
‘Pejorismus’ next to this line on the facing page, which would be the
opposite, holding that humanity is nothing to be boasting about since
human interference can bring about serious regress vis-à-vis the natural
processes.17 The hypothesis that our world might be the worst rather than
the best of all possible worlds may lead to a static pessimism. Beckett’s
‘pejorism’ is more dynamic, but it does not imply progress, nor necessarily
regress. He preferred the word ‘gress’ or ‘mere gress’, because of its ‘purity
from destination and hence from schedule’ (LSB I 186). In his
‘Whoroscope’ Notebook (UoR MS 3000, 45v), Beckett also jotted down
the terms ‘meliorism / pejorism’ on the page that faces the beginning of
a cluster of excerpts from Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der
Sprache (qtd. in Van Hulle and Nixon 2013: 155). This Kritik was one of
 NEGATIVE MODERNISM 9

the first tools in Beckett’s logoclastic aesthetic, after he had formulated it

in his letter to Axel Kaun of July 1937 as an attempt to bore holes in lan-
guage, metaphorically presented as a veil (LSB I 518)—a key metaphor,
possibly inspired by Schopenhauer’s reference to the Indian image of the
‘veil of Maya’. Mauthner’s critique of language adds a linguistic element
to the quest for the worst, namely:
(2) The awareness of the impossibility to say ‘this is the worst’.18
Mauthner’s linguistic scepticism was based on the assumption of the iden-
tity of human knowledge and language. Building on Darwin’s theory of
evolution, Mauthner suggests we should acknowledge that our senses just
happened to evolve in a particular way (Zufallssinne) and that, conse-
quently, our brainpower is simply an accidental intellect (Zufallsvernunft).19
Similarly, our language can never contribute to knowledge of the world,
according to Mauthner, for we can only experience what we know, what is
already contained in our vocabulary.20
But the question is whether all the facets of Beckett’s early, pre-war
poetics remained intact and applicable to his post-war writings. At least
some aspects, such as the Schopenhauerian idealistic aesthetics, seem to
disappear or be criticized in the post-war works. Ulrich Pothast discerns a
break with Schopenhauer’s aesthetics (though not with his worldview)
after the war. Whereas in the early 1930s, Beckett still believed there was
both an object of art (the totality of a past experience) and an artistic
­subject (the artist who, in a state of ‘will-lessness’ is granted contact with
‘true reality’), according to Pothast he dropped this ‘dualist’ outlook in his
post-war aesthetics and no longer assumed two entities that had to be
brought together. Instead, ‘there is just one process which in the end is
called “failing”’ (2008: 188).
Nonetheless, this did not constitute a complete departure from
Schopenhauer. For even without an artistic object there was still the obli-
gation to express. This obligation was in line with Schopenhauer’s notion
of the ‘pensum’ (which Beckett introduced in his essay Proust and which
frequently recurs in the three novels Molloy, Malone meurt, and
L’Innommable). So, as Pothast notes, Beckett did not turn away from
Schopenhauer in general; he only took his distance from Schopenhauer’s
idealist aesthetics. This also implied a distance from the belief in the pos-
sibility of a sudden and striking realization (revelation, epiphany, moment
of being) that marked several of the high modernists’ aesthetics.
Proust’s revelations are a case in point: in his copy of À la recherche du
temps perdu, Beckett marked a few passages about the white and red haw-
10 D. VAN HULLE

thorns as ‘Rev. 5 prepared’ (Proust 1928: 200–201), announcing the fifth

‘revelation’, the narrator’s important aesthetic experience relating to the
composer Vinteuil’s works, the white hawthorn standing for his sonata,
the pink hawthorn for the septet.21 The discovery of the pink hawthorn
after having enjoyed the white variety is compared to knowing the sonata
and discovering the septet with similarly renewed enjoyment. This is one
of the most directly Schopenhauerian aesthetic moments in Proust as it
suggests the possibility of attaining the so-called ‘Ideas’ through music
and momentarily tearing the ‘veil of Maya’ apart. Even though, like
Schopenhauer, Proust is known as a pessimistic writer, his aesthetic has an
optimistic streak. The comparison with the hawthorns becomes such an
important leitmotif in Proust’s work that it can hardly be a coincidence
that Beckett introduces them when Molloy is lying down beside his bicy-
cle in the ditch, where the white hawthorn stoops towards him. But
instead of triggering a powerful ‘mémoire involontaire’ or a ‘moment of
being’, any epiphanic potential is smothered by Molloy’s deadpan remark:
‘unfortunately I don’t like the smell of hawthorn’ (Mo 24).22 Beckett thus
effectively undermines the optimistic streak that is still pervasive in several
key modernist aesthetics.
Similarly, Beckett employs another intertextual reference to erode these
aesthetics: the Shakespearian leitmotif ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’
from Mrs. Dalloway, mentioned above. The leitmotif’s suggestion of a
‘deeper’ connection between Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith, in
terms of both androgyny and death,23 is again smothered in Happy Days,
where Winnie and Willie’s decomposed version of the leitmotif is in effect
reduced to a hearing test:

WINNIE: […] Can you hear me? [Pause.] I beseech you, Willie, just say
yes or no, can you hear me, just yes or nothing.
Pause.
WILLIE Yes.
WINNIE: [Turning front, same voice.] And now?
WILLIE: [Irritated.] Yes.
WINNIE: [Less loud.] And now?
WILLIE: [More irritated.] Yes.
WINNIE: [Still less loud.] And now? [A little louder.] And now?
WILLIE: [Violently.] Yes!
WINNIE: [Same voice.] Fear no more the heat o’ the sun. [Pause.] Did
you hear that?
 NEGATIVE MODERNISM 11

WILLIE: [Irritated.] Yes.

WINNIE: [Same voice.] What? [Pause.] What?
WILLIE: [More irritated.] Fear no more.
[Pause.]
WINNIE: [Same voice.] No more what? [Pause.] Fear no more what?
WILLIE: [Violently.] Fear no more!
WINNIE: [Normal voice, gabbled.] Bless you Willie I do appreciate your
goodness. (HD 15)

In an earlier version, Willie still replied by quoting the entire line.24 The
published versions insist on the crumbling of ‘the old style’, breaking the
intertextual straws at which Winnie tries to grasp. If the modernist aes-
thetic of epiphanies, moments of being, and involuntary memories can be
regarded as a remnant of the Leibnizian theodicy, its optimism and ‘lan-
guage of uplift’25 shrinks like Winnie on the mound (‘mamelon’) of Happy
Days.

Pejorism Enacted
But does this imply that Beckett is not a modernist? Not necessarily.
Beckett’s negative modernism is to modernism what Adorno’s negative
dialectics means with regard to Hegel’s dialectics and philosophy of his-
tory. In order to implement his poetics of pejorism, Beckett applied a
technique he admired in Joyce’s late style: enactment. In his first pub-
lished essay, ‘Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce’, Beckett used the example of
Joyce’s neologism ‘in twosome twiminds’ to express the notion of ‘doubt’
(Dis 28). Instead of using the English language, which according to
Beckett was ‘abstracted to death’, Joyce expressed doubt by enacting it, by
making his language be in two minds, and not just once but twice. The
famous conclusion—‘His writing is not about something, it is that some-
thing itself’ (27)—has led H. Porter Abbott to speak of an art of isness and
an art of aboutness (2013: 92). For Beckett, the ‘bad’ example of aboutness
was none of the modernists, but Honoré de Balzac. In his TCD lectures
he told his students that the problem with Balzac was that he always
explained everything: ‘If Balzac treated this he’d establish train of motives
& explain it all’ (TCD MIC 60, 27).26 In Dream of Fair to Middling
Women, Balzac is similarly criticized,27 but the problem with Dream is that
it did so by explaining Balzac’s urge to explain. Similarly, it also explained
Belacqua’s aesthetic instead of enacting it. Gradually, however, Beckett
12 D. VAN HULLE

did find a way to implement the aesthetic of inaudibilities, of the experi-

ence ‘between the phrases’, of the ‘compositions eaten away with terrible
silences’ à la Beethoven (D 139), by enacting rather than explaining his
poetics of the ‘Unwort’ (Dis 54). What exactly this ‘unword’ stood for in
Beckett’s developing poetics is hard to pinpoint, but apart from the logo-
clastic impulse the negative affix also suggests a connotation with Keats’s
‘negative capability’. This capability ‘of being in uncertainties, mysteries,
doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ (Keats 1899:
277) involves the ability to live with the notion of ‘unknowability’ or what
H. Porter Abbott calls the ‘cognitive sublime’ (2013: 35), which ‘involves
the most extreme type of unknowability—the inability of the inquiring
intelligence to account for its particularity as an inquiring intelligence’
(23). Abbott investigates the ‘experience of unknowing’ in literature (22)
and draws attention to Beckett’s remarkable capability of devising textual
mechanisms through which the reader experiences not just the character’s
consciousness (40), but above all the unknowability of that consciousness.
According to Abbott, Beckett achieves this effect ‘by keeping his reader
from premature closure, from settling on meaning when meaning can
only be approached, not arrived at’ (88). With his enactive ‘techniques of
total immersion’ (154) Beckett manages to make his readers feel this
unknowability, instead of explaining it à la Balzac and slipping into
aboutness.
Obviously, enactment in literature is not an exclusively twentieth-­
century phenomenon, but in combination with linguistic scepticism and a
preoccupation with the materiality of language, this enactment of a pro-
found dissatisfaction with received language may be a crucial element in
our investigation into Beckett’s relation to modernism.28 With this vol-
ume on Beckett and modernism, we would like to move beyond the point
of labelling (is Beckett a ‘modernist’, a ‘late modernist’, a ‘postmodernist’,
a ‘metamodernist’?) and instead examine the different ways in which
Beckett interacted with the broad intellectual and artistic climate com-
monly referred to as ‘modernism’, taking Susan Stanford Friedman’s ‘def-
initional excursions’ into account: ‘Modernism requires tradition to
“make it new”. Tradition comes into being only as it is rebelled against.
Definitional excursions into the meanings of modern, modernity, and mod-
ernism begin and end in reading the specificities of these contradictions’
(2001: 510).
That is indeed what the contributors to this volume have in common:
they read and discuss ‘the specificities of these contradictions’ to define
 NEGATIVE MODERNISM 13

not just the meanings of the terms modern, modernism, late modernism,
but above all the specificities of Samuel Beckett’s works against the back-
ground of modernism.

Modernism After Postmodernism

While the notion of ‘postmodernist fiction’ is being archived, put to rest,
and ‘historicized’ (see above; Ning 2013: 265), the term ‘modernism’ is
experiencing a remarkable revival. In Beckett, Modernism and the Material
Imagination, Steven Connor notes that, ‘for a time, Beckett became the
exemplary postmodernist’ when ‘during the 1980s and 1990s, it seemed
to make more sense for critics to use Beckett’s works to make the case for
some kind of break within modernism, moving beyond the forms of order
and authority represented by high and classic modernism into a world of
unlimited contingency’ (2014: 2). But with hindsight, after the ‘gener-
alised decompression’ of the idea of the postmodern, Connor also recog-
nizes that

there has always been something strained about the attempt to associate the
straitened means and subjects of Beckett’s work with the opulent pluralising
and opening out of sensibility that was held to be characteristic of postmod-
ernism. (2–3)

Still, postmodernism has had an impact on our views of modernism. As

Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers note in Modernism: Evolution of an Idea,
‘The postmodernist critiques of modernism helped energize the forma-
tion of the New Modernist Studies, and at the same time, postmodernist
projects such as ethnic studies and postcolonial studies have been widely
incorporated into it’ (2015: 227). In that sense, the so-called ‘New
Modernist Studies’ almost appear to be a form of récupération, an appro-
priation by the mainstream of originally subversive ideas. Latham and
Rogers define New Modernist Studies as referring ‘very broadly to schol-
arship produced after the postmodernist attacks on modernism; much of
this work challenges the previous, longstanding critical axioms about
modernism’s commitment to apolitical, ahistorical formal experimenta-
tion and its reliance on myth, allusion, and difficulty’ (225). Challenging
these axioms was ‘an immense project, a paradigm-shifting transitional
phase in the history of the idea of modernism’ (106), resulting in a canon
that became less and less knowable, ‘in part because it had not concluded
14 D. VAN HULLE

in 1939 or 1945 or 1950, but remained instead a central part of contem-

porary debates’ (105).
By including other participating agents, the modernist canon expanded
and what started as a passionate criticism of New Critical modernism
ended up rehabilitating modernism as a subversive paradigm with renewed
vitality. But again, the danger is in the neatness of identifications: if
Beckett’s works are turned into culturally and politically correct endorse-
ments of whatever happens to be the most current creed or trend in aca-
demia, the danger is that ‘modernism after postmodernism’ becomes a
new conformist doctrine. Instead of trying to find ways in which Beckett’s
works conform to the most fashionable academic theoretical frameworks,
it is also necessary to examine their power to withstand them.
It is undeniable that postmodernism’s abandonment of grand narra-
tives and the development of a great variety of theories after New
Criticism—from deconstruction to feminist theory, postcolonialism and
various forms of capital-T Theory—have left their mark on the way we
understand modernist fiction. All the more reason, therefore, to reassess
Beckett’s relation to modernism and to examine the traces that post-
modernism has left on our understanding of modernism. To undertake
this reassessment, the present volume focuses on a wide range of topics:
Beckett’s relation to other modernists (see the contributions by Sam
Slote, José Francisco Fernández, Andy Wimbush, William Davies), the
literary canon and Ireland (Onno Kosters, Feargal Whelan, Paul Fagan),
his connection to modernist theatre and other art forms (S. E. Gontarski,
Evelyne Clavier, Galina Kiryushina), and his fascination for the human
mind (Ulrika Maude, Olga Beloborodova and Pim Verhulst). A number
of contributors attempt to redefine Beckett’s modernism in different
terms—from ‘modified’ (Jean-Michel Rabaté) to ‘late’ (Shane Weller) or
‘belated’ modernism (Conor Carville)—in order to indicate, with the
benefit of hindsight, how Beckett’s oeuvre is to be situated within the
modernist continuum. This ‘modernism after postmodernism’ in rela-
tion to Beckett’s works is the overarching theme of the present
volume.

Acknowledgement The research leading to these results has received funding

from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh
Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) / ERC grant agreement no. 313609.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Hotspur, 2.
Howe, Earl, 75.
Hrepandune, Hreopadune, Hreopandune, 6.
Huckin, Dr., 85.
Humbert, 9.
“Hundred Rolls,” 101.

Icknield Street, 111.

Icles, father of St., Guthlac, 11.
Incumbents of Repton, 24.
Ingleby, 51, 52, 121, 122.
Ingulph, Abbot of Crowland, 9, 13.
Infanta of Spain, 39.
“Itineraries,” 3, 7.
“Ivanhoe,” 92.

James I., 36, 75, 84, 113, 125.

Jennings, John, 65.
Jewitt, Llewellyn, 42, 72, 74.
Jones, Inigo, 135.
Jordan, William, 70.

Kale (Calke), 50.

Kenewara, Abbess of Repton, 9.
Kerry, Rev. Charles, 101.
King’s Newton, 126.
Kinton, Godfrey, 66.
Knights Templars, 99, 100.
“Knowl Hills,” 123.

Lancaster, Thomas, Earl of, 115.

Lathbury, 109.
Layton, Dr. Richard, 53.
Le Brun, 111.
Leigh, Sir Henry, 109, 130.
Dr. Thomas, 53.
Robert, 109.
Leicester, 95.
Leland (Collectanea), 8.
Leofric, 9.
Lichfield Diocesan Registers.
Lilleshall Abbey, 92.
Littleover, 128.
Lindisfarne, 8.
Lindsey, 6, 9.
Longford, Sir Nicholas, 130.
Loudoun, Edith Maud, Countess of, 98.
Earl of, 125.
Loughborough, Lord, 96, 113.
Louis XI., King of France, 93.
Lyon, John, 61.
Lysons’ “Magna Britannia,” 3.
Manchester, 62.
Manor of Repton, 4.
Repton Priory, 4.
Margaret, wife of Henry VI., 125.
Marleberge, Thomas de, Abbot of Evesham, 15.
Martin, F. O., 63.
Mary, Queen of England, 53.
Scots, 94, 113.
Masters of Etwall Hospital, 120-1.
Matilda (Maud) Countess of Chester, 10, 51.
Measham, Chapelry of, 51-2.
Melbourne, 124-127.
Memorial Hall, Pears, 83-5.
“Memorials of St. Guthlac,” 13.
Mercia, 7, 8, 9, 15.
Merewald, brother of Wulphere, 9.
Mickleover, 127.
Milton, 4, 51.
“Minstrels Court” at Tutbury, 114.
Moira, 97.
Molanus Major, 105.
Monastery, Saxon, at Repton, 17.
“Monasticon”, Dugdale’s, 51.
“Monks’ Bridge,” 110.
Mortimer, 2.
Sir William, 92.
Mosley, 63, 119.
Sir Oswald, 113.
Motteram, Mr., 69.
Mugliston, W. L., 73.
Muniment Chest, 65.
Mundy, Robert, 97.
Musca(m), Thomas de (Chronicle of), 50.
Musden Grange, 63.

Names of old Repton Families, 28-30.

Naseby Field, Battle of, 95.
Needham, Col., 95.
Newark, 52, 102.
Newton, Alderman Hugh, 67.
Richard, 24, 127.
Newton Solney, 51, 74, 130-2.
Norsemen, 7.
Nottingham, Charles, Earl of, 125.

“Old Trent,” 2.
Osthryth, Queen of Ethelred, 125.
Oswiu, King of Northumbria, 8.
Owen Glendower, 2.
Overton, Prior of Repton, 82.

Pack and Chapman, 47.

Paget, Thomas, Lord, 127.
Sir William, 127.
Palladio Andrea, 135.
Parish Chest, 20.
Map, 2.
Patent Rolls, 101.
Peada, 8.
Pears, Dr., 62, 71, 75, 76, 82.
Memorial Hall, 83-5.
Pega, sister of St. Guthlac, 14.
Peile, Dr., 71, 82.
Penda, King of Mercia, 8.
Perryn, Sir William, 63.
“Pieces of Evidence XVIII.,” 35.
Pilgrim, statue of, at Ashby, 96.
Pilkington, J., 3.
“Pinfold,” 33.
Pipe, Sir Robert, 130.
Pistern Hills, 4.
Place-name Repton, Chap. II.
Pole, Edward Sacheverell, 127.
Pont l’Evêque, Roger de, 115.
Poor Men of Etwall Hospital, 119.
Port or Porte, Sir John, 54, 62, 115, 118.
Potlac or Potlock, 119, 129.
Powell, James and Sons, 23, 112.
Prior, Dr., 21, 82.
Priors of Repton, 60.
Priory of Repton, Chap. VII.

Randulph, Abbot of Evesham, 16.

Ratcliff, Robert, 131.
Rawlins, Rev, R. R.
Reade, Sir William, 127.
“Reliquary,” 42, 46, 71, 72.
Repandunum, 3, 7, 8.
Repton Abbey, 13, 15.
Repton Church, Chap. IV.
Repton Church Bells, Chap. VI.
Books, 38.
Registers, Chap. V.
Repton Common, 1.
Repton Hall, 81-82.
Repton Priory, Chap. VII.
Repton Rocks, 51.
“Repton’s Saints,” (S.S. Guthlac and Wystan) Chap. III.
Repton School, Chap. VIII.
Repton School Chapel, 77-80.
Repton School v. Thacker, Chap. IX.
Repton School Tercentenary, 75-77.
Repton Tile Kiln, Chap. X.
Reresby, Thomas, 128.
Rollestons, 101.

Sacheverell, Edward, 127.

Sales, 100.
“Saltpeter men,” 34.
“Sanctus Bell” (St. Guthlac’s), 15.
“Saxon Way, After the,” 8.
Scott, Sir Walter, 92.
Gilbert, 99.
School Houses, &c., Chap. XII.
Seccandune (Seckington), 6, 9.
Segraves, 104.
Selwyn, Bishop, 11.
“Severn Shore,” 2.
Shakespeare, (Henry IV. Act iii.), 2.
Shaw, Samuel, (O.R.), 26, 98.
Shaw, Stebbing-, (O.R.), 3, 7, 8, 22, 107.
Sheriffe, Lawrence, 61.
Shelmerdine, D., (O.R.), 100.
Sherwood Forest, 1.
Shirley, Sir Henry, 135.
Shrewsbury School, 61.
Sinfin Moor, 99.
“Slaughter House Yard,” 70.
Sleath, Dr., 22, 82.
Sleigh, Sir Samuel, (O.R.), 66.
“Sleepy Quire,” 20.
Smisby, 51, 92.
Solney, Sir Alured de, 22, 52, 130.
William de, 130.
Spernore, Sir William, 130.
Spilsbury, Rev. B. W., 128.
Spruner and Menke’s “Atlas Antiquus,” 8.
Stafford, Nigel de, 121, 132.
Stanhope, Sir Michael, 127.
Thomas, 62.
Stanley, 109.
Stanton by Bridge, 103-4.
Stantons, de, 103.
Starkey, Simon, 63.
Staunton, Harold, 135-6.
Stenson, 99.
Stephen, King, 51.
Stocks, Repton, 33.
“Strelley’s part,” 3.
Strelley, Philip de, 3.
Stretton, 111-112.
Stretton, Bishop of Lichfield, 22, 52, 130.
Swarkeston, 100-3.
Bridge, 52, 101-2.
Church, 4.
House, 101.
Tamworth, 6, 9.
Tanner’s Notitia, 8.
Tapestry at Egginton Hall, 110-11.
Tapestry at Etwall Hall, 118-19.
Tatwine, 12, 13.
Taylor, John, & Co., 23, 45, 48-9.
Tercentenary of Repton School, 75-77, 82.
Tette, mother of St. Guthlac, 11.
Thacker, Francis, 46.
Gilbert, 53, 54, 64, 65.
Godfrey, 47, 65.
Jane, 26.
John, 24.
Mary, 4, 54, 81.
Thomas, 53.
“Quire,” 20.
Thorpe, John, 45.
Thurgaton Priory, 74.
Tickenhall, 4, 132-4.
Tile-Kiln, Repton, 71-4.
“Topographer,” 7, 8.
“Tournament Field,” 92.
Towton Moor, battle of, 93.
Tutbury, 113-15, 135.
Horn, 114.
Twyford, 2, 99.
Ullock, Dr., 27, 65.
Uttoxeter, 63.

“Valor Ecclesiasticus,” 53.

Vaughan, Dr., 76.
Verdons, 121.

Wærburh (St. Werburgh), Abbess of Repton, 9.

Wales, 2.
Walkelin, Robert, 109.
Walton, 8.
Ward, John, F.S.A., 74.
Waste, Joan, 63.
“Watchinge and Wardinge,” 34.
Watson, Mr., 66, 69.
Wendesley, Richard and Roger, 134.
West, Chester, 62.
Whitehead, Mr., 69.
Whyman, Mrs., 98.
Wiglaf (Withlaf), King of Mercia, 9.
Wilfrid, Abbot of Crowland, 11.
William Rufus, 50.
Willington, 2, 4, 52.
Wilmot, Edward and Sir Robert, 127.
Wimund, father of St. Wystan, 15.
“Winchester, Statute of,” 34.
Windsor Castle, 93, 136.
Winwadfield, Battle of, 8.
Wirksworth, 9.
Wistan or Wystan, St., 9, Chap. III.
Wistanstowe, 9, 15.
Woodrooffe, Canon, 76.
Woodyatt, Rev. George, 23.
Worcester, 2.
Wright, Mrs. Margery, 97.
Wulphere, King of Mercia, 8, 9.
Wyatville, Sir Geoffrey, 106.

Zouch (Zouche), Alan la, and Roger, 92.

Zouch (Zouche), Ashby de la, 92-99

THE END.

A. J. LAWRENCE, PRINTER, REPTON.

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