Samuel Beckett's Lyric Failure

(Hardback)

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Providing one of the first book-length accounts of Samuel Becketts poetry, this book demonstrates how Becketts poetry reconfigures lyrical language, while also providing a new context for his experiments in poetic form by reading him alongside nineteenth and twentieth century European poets such as Hlderlin, Mallarm, Rimbaud, Montale, and Apollinaire. Offering the reader a new way of reading Samuel Becketts poetry, this book studies Beckett's poems' complex interactions between subjectivity, lyrical language, and human voice. Beckett employs lyric tactics that range from deixis, parataxis, and caesura to specific kinds of voicing, muting, and punctuation, tactics this book analyses under the rubric of lyric failure. Beckett uses these tactics to situate the human subject and poetics between life/death, event/non-event, and beginning/ending. Giving an in-depth view of Becketts poetry beyond the usual comparisons with his prose and drama, this book also offers an understanding of failure as a productive force that shapes literary form.

Author Bio

Mantra Mukim is the Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at CY Cergy Paris Universit, France.