"For to End Yet Again": Continuity and Closure in Samuel Beckett's Fizzles 公开
Hager, Stephen R. (2010)
Published
Abstract
This study attempts to explore a seminal yet largely overlooked
aspect of Samuel
Beckett's artistic achievement: his shorter prose, with a
particular focus on his late collection
Fizzles (1973-75). While often considered to be a series of
"failed starts," this study views the
texts not as failures of completion, but rather as willfully
undermining the aesthetic norm of
completion and integrality to which most works of literature have
historically adhered.
Influenced by the unfinished poems that proliferated during the
Romantic Period, such as
Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," Beckett has cultivated an aesthetic
expression of incompletion that
suggests that his works should not be seen as distinct, autonomous
entities but rather as
fragments of an ongoing project. The incompletion of these works is
necessitated by Beckett's
focus on the inherently divisive nature of consciousness. Because
memory does not serve as a
means of connecting the consciousness of the present with the
memory of the past, these two are
presented within the text as being separate. To end a work that
fixates on the inherently
fragmented nature of existence with a conclusive finale would be
inappropriate, and this study,
using Barbra Herrnstein Smith's Poetic Closure as a major
source of reference, examines how
Beckett manages to attenuate the effects of closure in his works
again and again. In so doing, his
works represent the tenacious striving to "end yet again" (Beckett,
"8" 246).
Table of Contents
Table of Contents:
Introduction:…………………………………………………………………………………...................1
Chapter 1: The Romantic Legacy in Beckett's Prose Fragments……………………….6
Chapter 2: "Fizzle 1": A Weary Traveler in the Dark………………………………………...16
Chapter 3: Memory and Ruin in "Fizzle 3: Afar a Bird".…………………………………….33
Chapter 4: "For to End Yet Again".………………………………………………....................47
Bibliography:.…………………………………………………………………………………..................66
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