Samuel Beckett's How It Is: Philosophy in Translation
The first sustained exegesis of a neglected masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, Samuel Beckett’s How It Is
This book maps out the novel’s complex network of intertexts, sources and echoes, interprets its highly experimental writing and explains the work’s great significance for twentieth-century literature. It offers a clear pathway into this remarkable bilingual novel, identifying Beckett’s use of previously unknown sources in the history of Western philosophy, from the ancient and modern periods, and challenging critical orthodoxies. Through careful archival scholarship and attention to the dynamics of self-translation, the book traces Beckett’s transformation of his narrator’s ‘ancient voice’, his intellectual heritage, into a mode of aesthetic representation that offers the means to think beyond intractable paradoxes of philosophy. This shift in the work’s relation to tradition marks a hiatus in literary modernism, a watershed moment whose deep and enduring significance may now be appreciated.
Key Features

Offers the first comprehensive treatment of Beckett’s most poorly understood novel, identifying the breadth of its philosophical and literary sourcesMakes extensive use of manuscript evidence and newly accessible notes from Beckett’s reading in philosophyGuides the reader through Beckett’s philosophical and theological sources, highlighting his innovative and original dialectics between the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, the Ancient Stoics, the early Church Fathers and desert mystics, seventeenth-century mystics and Rationalists

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Samuel Beckett's How It Is: Philosophy in Translation
The first sustained exegesis of a neglected masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, Samuel Beckett’s How It Is
This book maps out the novel’s complex network of intertexts, sources and echoes, interprets its highly experimental writing and explains the work’s great significance for twentieth-century literature. It offers a clear pathway into this remarkable bilingual novel, identifying Beckett’s use of previously unknown sources in the history of Western philosophy, from the ancient and modern periods, and challenging critical orthodoxies. Through careful archival scholarship and attention to the dynamics of self-translation, the book traces Beckett’s transformation of his narrator’s ‘ancient voice’, his intellectual heritage, into a mode of aesthetic representation that offers the means to think beyond intractable paradoxes of philosophy. This shift in the work’s relation to tradition marks a hiatus in literary modernism, a watershed moment whose deep and enduring significance may now be appreciated.
Key Features

Offers the first comprehensive treatment of Beckett’s most poorly understood novel, identifying the breadth of its philosophical and literary sourcesMakes extensive use of manuscript evidence and newly accessible notes from Beckett’s reading in philosophyGuides the reader through Beckett’s philosophical and theological sources, highlighting his innovative and original dialectics between the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, the Ancient Stoics, the early Church Fathers and desert mystics, seventeenth-century mystics and Rationalists

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Samuel Beckett's How It Is: Philosophy in Translation

Samuel Beckett's How It Is: Philosophy in Translation

by Anthony Cordingley
Samuel Beckett's How It Is: Philosophy in Translation

Samuel Beckett's How It Is: Philosophy in Translation

by Anthony Cordingley

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$36.95 
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Overview

The first sustained exegesis of a neglected masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, Samuel Beckett’s How It Is
This book maps out the novel’s complex network of intertexts, sources and echoes, interprets its highly experimental writing and explains the work’s great significance for twentieth-century literature. It offers a clear pathway into this remarkable bilingual novel, identifying Beckett’s use of previously unknown sources in the history of Western philosophy, from the ancient and modern periods, and challenging critical orthodoxies. Through careful archival scholarship and attention to the dynamics of self-translation, the book traces Beckett’s transformation of his narrator’s ‘ancient voice’, his intellectual heritage, into a mode of aesthetic representation that offers the means to think beyond intractable paradoxes of philosophy. This shift in the work’s relation to tradition marks a hiatus in literary modernism, a watershed moment whose deep and enduring significance may now be appreciated.
Key Features

Offers the first comprehensive treatment of Beckett’s most poorly understood novel, identifying the breadth of its philosophical and literary sourcesMakes extensive use of manuscript evidence and newly accessible notes from Beckett’s reading in philosophyGuides the reader through Beckett’s philosophical and theological sources, highlighting his innovative and original dialectics between the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, the Ancient Stoics, the early Church Fathers and desert mystics, seventeenth-century mystics and Rationalists


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781474440615
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Publication date: 08/25/2020
Series: Other Becketts
Pages: 304
Sales rank: 891,907
Product dimensions: 6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Anthony Cordingley is ARC Discovery Early Career Research Fellow in the Department of English, University of Sydney, on secondment from the Universityé Paris 8 – Vincennes-Saint-Denis, where he is Associate Professor in English and Translation Studies.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Series Editor’s Preface

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. A Poetics of Translation: Dante, Gœthe and the Paideia

2. Pythagorean Mysticism / Democritean Wisdom

3. The Physical Cosmos: Aristotelian Dialectics

4. A Comedy of Ethics: From Plato to Christian Asceticism (Via Rembrandt)

5. Mystic Paths, Inward Turns

6. Pascal’s Miraculous Tongue

7. Spinoza, Leibniz, or a World "Less Exquisitely Organized"

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Index

What People are Saying About This

There are few critical studies that one can identify as outstanding. This is one of the few.

University of Otago Professor Chris Ackerley

There are few critical studies that one can identify as outstanding. This is one of the few.

University of Pennsylvania Jean-Michel Rabaté

This is the first guide to Beckett’s darkest and most impenetrable novel. This wonderfully informed commentary based on first-hand knowledge of unpublished manuscripts details the numerous philosophical references contained in How It Is. Cordingley makes us grasp how the strength and the beauty of Beckett’s unforgettable sentences derive from countless hidden references, all the while sketching a new theory of Beckett’s use of philosophy.

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