Samuel Beckett and the World Republic of Letters

Abstract

In Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution, Pascale Casanova explores the formal and the historical elements of Beckett’s works to establish how the bilingual writer masters the art of “abstractification” in his pioneering venture of testing the limits of language. Casanova closely investigates the cosmopolitan space of Paris in particular in order to explain the socio-political field from which Beckett’s bilingual works stemmed. As this article argues, it is this early search for a literary field with Beckett’s autonomous writing at its core that leads Casanova to her critically acclaimed and contentious notion of the world republic of letters.