Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Beckett, Samuel - Steven Miskinis (essay date winter 1996)

Steven Miskinis (essay date winter 1996)

SOURCE: Miskinis, Steven. “Enduring Recurrence: Samuel Beckett's Nihilistic Poetics.” ELH 63, no. 4 (winter 1996): 1047-67.

[In the following essay, Miskinis examines Beckett's postmodern nihilism.]

In Proust, Beckett remarks, “by no expedient of macabre transubstantiation can the grave sheets serve as swaddling clothes,” a parenthetic comment that explains why the moments of the self's transition between different habitual adaptations to its world “represent the perilous zones in the life of an individual.”¹ Beckett's comment could easily apply to his own oeuvre insofar as we place it within the broad context of the close of the historical epoch of Western metaphysics. Beckett's work then marks a transition that manifests itself by the increasing capacity to delimit, criticize and undermine metaphysical conceptions—including the conceptual framework within...

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