Trapped in Thought: A Study of the Beckettian Mentality

by Eric P. Levy

Overview

Eric P. Levy's book investigates the mentality or attitude of cognitive apprehension expressed in Beckettian texts. Primary areas of concern include how the Beckettian attitude began, what concepts it invents or transforms to sustain its mode of thought, how the mentality wards off factors which would refute or heal it, and, most paradoxical of all, why this mentality ultimately reduces the mind to an estranged source of thought, continuously repudiated by its own awareness. The study uncovers the strategies by which experience is evacuated of all content but that consistent with the attitude registering it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815631026
Publisher:	Syracuse University Press
Publication date:	12/28/2006
Series:	Irish Studies
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.92(d)

About the Author

Eric P. Levy is associate professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is the author of Beckett and the Voice of Species: A Study of the Prose Fiction.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations     ix
Introduction     1
The Beckettian Mimesis of Pain     20
The Beckettian Mimesis of Seeing Nothing     36
The Beckettian Mimesis of Absence     49
Living Without a Life: The Disintegration of the Christian-Humanist Synthesis in Molloy     66
Malone Dies and the Beckettian Mimesis of Inexistence     83
The Unnamable: The Metaphysics of Beckettian Introspection     100
False Innocence in Waiting for Godot     123
To Be Is to Be Deceived: The Relation of Berkeley and Plato to Waiting for Godot     144
Disintegrative Process in Endgame     162
Krapp's Last Tape and the Beckettian Mimesis of Regret     180
Conclusion: The Beckettian Absolute Universal     195
References     219
Index     237

What People are Saying About This

Nels Pearson

Wholly enlightening and an important read. . . . The import, strength, and originality of the project lie in Levy's thorough knowledge of the Beckett oeuvre and his related concern for allowing primary texts to speak as much as possible about the uniquely complex and profound, ultimately discernable and consistent, modes of existence that concerned their author. (Nels Pearson, Tennessee State University)