@article{1448342,
      author = {Wolterman, Nick,},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1448342},
      title = {Beckett's imagined interpreters and the failures of  modernism /},
      abstract = {Samuel Becketts work is littered with ironic  self-reflexive comments on presumed audience expectations  that it should ultimately make explicable sense. An ample  store of letters and anecdotes suggests Becketts own  preoccupation with and resistance to similar interpretive  mindsets. Yet until now such concerns have remained the  stuff of scholarly footnotes and asides. Becketts Imagined  Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism addresses these  issues head-on and investigates how Becketts ideas about  who he writes for affect what he writes. What it finds  speaks to current understandings not only of Becketts  techniques and ambitions, but also of modernisms  experiments as fundamentally compromised challenges to  enshrined ways of understanding and organizing the social  world. Becketts uniquely anxious audience-targeting brings  out similarly self-doubting strategies in the work of other  experimental twentieth-century writers and artists in whom  he is interested: his corpus proves emblematic of a  modernism that understands its inability to achieve  transformative social effects all at once, but that  nevertheless judiciously complicates too-neat distinctions  drawn within ongoing culture wars. For its re-evaluations  of four key points of orientation for understanding  Becketts artistic ambitionshis arch critical  pronouncements, his postwar conflations of value and  valuelessness, his often-ambiguous self-commentary, and his  sardonic metatheatrical playas well as for its running  dialogue with wider debates around modernism as a social  phenomenon, this book is of interest to students and  researchers interested in Beckett, modernism, and the  relations between modern and contemporary artistic and  social developments. Nick Wolterman is an independent  scholar based in York, UK. He received his PhD in English  and Related Literature from the University of York. .},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05650-5},
      recid = {1448342},
      pages = {1 online resource (ix, 204 pages).},
}