Beckett’s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism

Samuel Beckett’s 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 Beckett’s own preoccupation with and resistance to similar interpretive mindsets. Yet until now such concerns have remained the stuff of scholarly footnotes and asides.
Beckett’s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism addresses these issues head-on and investigates how Beckett’s ideas about who he writes for affect what he writes. What it finds speaks to current understandings not only of Beckett’s techniques and ambitions, but also of modernism’s experiments as fundamentally compromised challenges to enshrined ways of understanding and organizing the social world. Beckett’s 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.

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