Silence Nowhen ― Late Modernism, Minimalism, and Silence in the Work of Samuel Beckett

When one thinks of the works of Beckett, silence hardly comes to mind. We are prone to examine the noise, to listen to the actors, including Beckett, as they deliver their lines, not as they hold back, anticipating or not. Chesney (comparative literature, National Taiwan U.) examines the moments of silence as designated or allowed in his plays and literature, showing how the silences were not emptiness, but minimalism, and therefore not postmodern. Chesney links Beckett's ties to minimalism to influences such as Proust and Joyce, validating his theory that Beckett's heart was not postmodern. In the fascinating final chapter, Chesney finds Adorno's work in Endspiel to predict Beckett's predicament; at this time, silence is being confused in the mind of the beholder as the jumbled silence of postmodernism. In its own time, the silence would be silence. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Duncan McColl Chesney is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the National Taiwan University in Taipei. He holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale University and has published on various literary, cinematic, and film theoretical topics including pieces on Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, Coetzee, and Visconti. He was a recipient of a Wu Da-You Award for young scholars from the National Science Council of Taiwan in 2012 and continues to pursue research and teaching interests in comparative European modernism, literary theory, film studies, and modern British, Commonwealth, and Irish literatures.