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Description of  Samuel Beckett's How It Is: Philosophy in Translation (Other Becketts)

The first sustained exegesis of a neglected masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, Samuel Becketts How It Is This book maps out the novels complex network of intertexts, sources and echoes, interprets its highly experimental writing and explains the works great significance for twentieth-century literature. It offers a clear pathway into this remarkable bilingual novel, identifying Becketts use of previously unknown sources in the history of Western philosophy, from the ancient and modern periods, and challenging critical orthodoxies. Through careful archival scholarship and attention to the dynamics of self-translation, the book traces Becketts transformation of his narrators ancient voice, his intellectual heritage, into a mode of aesthetic representation that offers the means to think beyond intractable paradoxes of philosophy. This shift in the works relation to tradition marks a hiatus in literary modernism, a watershed moment whose deep and enduring significance may now be appreciated. Read more