LECTURE: Theorising Beckett’s Influence on 21st Century Fiction.

Dr Paul Stewart

“the end is in the beginning and yet you go on”  
Theorising Beckett’s Influence on 21st Century Fiction.

Venue:

Department of English Studies, Conference Room

University of Cyprus

9 Klimentos Str. (2nd floor, Eliades Building), 1061 Nicosia

Zoom link: https://ucy.zoom.us/j/68544333476?pwd=vjOPCVRqZmZmD1qAk8f7rLnvvv2cfE.1

Wednesday, 9 October 2024 @ 16:00

Beckett’s fiction has most often been considered as a literary end point. For example, for Pascale Casanova, Beckett’s work has reached a stage of autonomy through “total literary abstraction”. For Harold Bloom (whose concept of the anxiety of influence has cast a long shadow over the theoretical appreciation of literary relations), Beckett is the last author for whom a truly canonical status can be claimed, not least because he is the repository of Western literary history. From two
very different perspectives, Bloom and Casanova concur on one point: Beckett is a form of culmination.

If one takes this representation of Beckett as a terminus, how can a contemporary author be usefully influenced by Beckett? Is one condemned to an inevitable process of re-building, of re-establishing the possibilities of fiction that Beckett has so ruthlessly reduced? Does going “on” from Beckett only mean a “going back”? Drawing on the work of the Occasionalist philosopher Leibniz (by whom Beckett was ‘influenced’), the contemporary novelist J. M. Coetzee (upon whom Beckett
was an ‘influence’) and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, this lecture hopes to demarcate an arena in which Beckett’s work continues to resonate with contemporary authors and to open up new possibilities for on-going creativity within fiction.