Wandering and Home

How are we to think of Beckett's fiction? Lyrical, inventive, uncompromising, beautifully precise-an immense achievement—is it really an art that proclaims the disintegration of language and of the imagination, as traditional readings conclude? Eyal Amiran's study demonstrates that Beckett's work does not embody the failure of synthetic vision. Beckett's fiction transposes a large intertextual logic from the Western metaphysics it is said to disown, and so takes its place in a literary and philosophical tradition that extends from Plato to Joyce and Yeats. At the same time, it develops as a serial narrative, from the early novels to the late short fictions, to unravel the story itself that its metaphysical tradition tells.

“This whole book runs counter to the way most (including this reader) have read Beckett. Among the many books on Beckett that have been published, it will stand out as an original and distinctive addition.”—H. Porter Abbott, University of California, Santa Barbara

“Until now, no one has worked out the complex unity of Beckett’s whole fictional canon—and revealed its systematic inner logic—in the richly detailed and persuasive manner that Amiran here achieves.”—Charles Rossman, University of Texas

Eyal Amiran is Assistant Professor of English at North Carolina State University and coeditor of Essays in Postmodern Culture (1993).

Literary Studies

           English

           Literary Theory & Criticism

Philosophy