Beckett’s Dystopian Trilogy, Part I: The Irrelevance of Godot

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1505-9057.63.01

Keywords:

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, genetic criticism, phrenology

Abstract

The article concentrates on a variety of textual alterations introduced to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot either in the process of translation by the author or by the third parties. In a close reading of these changes the article follows the philosophy of human degradation and connects it both with Beckett’s own ideas on the matter and with a broad cultural context of the epoch. Apart from this philological and cultural analysis, the article advances a thesis that the main theme of Beckett play is not necessarily the absence of Godot/God, or a figure of authority, but the fact of humanity slowly descending into stagnation, depletion of energy and hope as well as physical deprivation. Therefore the article offers an interesting study of Beckett from textual and cultural perspectives, but it also makes a contribution to the genetic criticism of his oeuvre.

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Author Biography

Stanley Gontarski, Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English, Florida State University, Department of English, Tallahassee, FL 32306-1580, USA

Stanley Gontarski is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University, where he edited the “Journal of Beckett Studies” from 1989–2008. His recent books include (with eds. Paul Ardoin and Laci Mattison) Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2013) and the follow-up Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism appeared in 2014. His critical, bilingual edition of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire was published as Un tram che si chiama desiderio /A Streetcar Named Desire in the series Canone teatrale europeo/Canon of European Drama from Editioni ETS in Pisa, 2012. He has also edited The Beckett Critical Reader: Archives, Theories, and Translations (2012) and The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts (2014), both from Edinburgh University Press; his monograph, Creative In volution: Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze has appeared in 2015 to launch his book series “Other Becketts” with Edinburgh University Press, from which his Beckett Matters: Essays on Beckett’s Late Modernism appeared in fall 2016. His Przedstawienie Becketta: Eseje o Becketcie (eds. Tomasz Wiśniewski and Miłosz Wojtyna) appeared from the University of Gdańsk and Maski Press in 2016. His Beckett’s “Happy Day”: A Manuscript Study, appeared from Ohio State University Press in 2017; Revisioning Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s Decadent Turn appeared from Bloomsbury Academic in 2018; and his Burroughs Unbound: William Burroughs and the Performance of Writingis forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic and Włodzimierz Staniewski and the Phenomenon of “Gardzienice” (eds. with Tomasz Wiśniewski and Katarzyna Kręglewska) is forthcoming from Routledge.

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Published

2021-12-30

How to Cite

Gontarski, S. (2021). Beckett’s Dystopian Trilogy, Part I: The Irrelevance of Godot. Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Litteraria Polonica, 63(4), 7–27. https://doi.org/10.18778/1505-9057.63.01

Issue

Vol. 63 No. 4 (2021): Literature Studies. Around the 20th century

Section

Articles

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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