Going on beyond Modernism in Beckett's <i>Texts for Nothing</i>

Ruben Moi

doi:10.7557/13.1855

Authors

Ruben Moi

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7557/13.1855

Keywords:

Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing,

Abstract

The title of Samuel Beckett's thirteen minimalist prose texts from 1954, Texts for Nothing, contrasts strongly with the award of the Nobel Prize for literature and the canonization of the author in 1969. This prestigious
recognition can clearly be regarded as a public act of Beckettian irony, as hardly any other author has done more to refute ideas of canonicity and to undermine the foundations of the institution of literature - not to mention principal philosophical positions. Beckett's failure to appear at the ceremonial event seems symbolic of the many elsewheres of his idiosyncratic imagination and the uncanny resistance in his texts to the demands of aesthetics and the claims of logics, to whose reconstructions his diversity of textual experimentalism has contributed so forcefully.

Author Biography

Ruben Moi

Ruben Moi har en doktorgrad i engelsk og irsk litteratur fra
Universitetet i Bergen, men er nå bosatt i Tromsø. Han har bidratt med kapitler til bøker om den irske Nobelprisvinneren, Seamus Heaney, og skuespillforfatteren Martin McDonagh, samt artikler og anmeldelser i internasjonale og norske tidskrift om blant andre James Joyce, Paul Muldoon, T.S. Eliot og Irvine Welsh. Han jobber for tiden med transtekstualitet i nord-irsk samtidspoesi.