Samuel Beckett

Rosemarie Bodenheimer (Professor Emerita of English, Boston College)

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English

Oxford University Press
17 November 2022

Series: My Reading

"A book on the experience of reading the works of Samuel Beckett.

After a life of writing about Victorian novelists, Rosemarie Bodenheimer found herself entranced by the work of Samuel Beckett. In this book she shares her journey of discovery with readers who may or may not be familiar with Beckett's novels and stories. She follows his trajectory from the first unpublished novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, through the great post-war trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, and on to the ever more experimental inventions in the shorter, later fictions, and monologues. Through readings of his work alongside extracts from his published correspondence, Beckett emerges as a sympathetic human figure, a poet of productive doubt, and a brilliant stylist of mood changes and second thoughts. Bodenheimer considers Beckett's treatments of memory, nostalgia, and grief, and the forms he finds to convey those essential human experiences while avoiding melodrama or sentimentality. His dramatized relationship with his own writing is a crucial part of that emotional landscape. His playful jousts with the conventions of novel-writing show how, from the start, Beckett challenged the notion of character and other inherited novel conventions. The book also emphasizes his dismantling of the autobiographical ""I"" his moving narratives of attachment and loss, and the inimitable mixture of comedy and pathos he creates by inventing outlandish situations to which his characters respond in very recognizable human ways."

By: Rosemarie Bodenheimer (Professor Emerita of English Boston College)
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 223mm, Width: 145mm, Spine: 14mm
Weight: 304g
ISBN: 9780192858733
ISBN 10: 0192858734
Series: My Reading
Pages: 160
Publication Date: 17 November 2022
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Rosemarie Bodenheimer spent her working life as Professor of English at Boston College, specializing in Victorian fiction. In The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (1994) and Knowing Dickens (2007), she fashioned a form of biographical criticism that juxtaposes a writer's letters with published works. After retirement, she published a history of her German Jewish family's passage from Nazi Germany to the US, based on a large archive of family letters and other writings (2016). An experiment in biographical fiction followed, drawn from Mendelssohn family letters in 19th century Germany (2018).