Quotidian Beckett - Art of Everyday Life

Samuel Beckett was a writer of the everyday. Despite his association with the literary avant-garde and his commitment to an increasingly austere aesthetic, his writing betrays an enduring preoccupation with the quotidian rhythms of modern life, including the experiences of boredom, routine, habit, and consumption. Quotidian Beckett: Art of Everyday Life explores the writer's evolving response to this realm of experience, which philosophers and sociologists have paradoxically described as both everywhere and nowhere, obvious and enigmatic. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre's influential theories of everyday life, the Element demonstrates how Beckett's writing, by producing forms that resist transparency and closure, invites us to see the mundane in unfamiliar, unsettling, and politically charged ways. In this regard, his artistic achievement lies in rendering the elusiveness of the quotidian with a vividness that other modes of discourse seldom achieve.

List of contents

Introduction; 1. A form to accommodate the quotidian: dream of fair to middling women, Murphy, and Watt; 2. Almost a routine, twice: waiting for Godot and endgame; 3. Negativity and happiness: happy days; 4. The terrorism of everyday life: rough for theatre ii, the lost ones, and rockabye; Conclusion; References.

Product details

• Authors: Patrick (Arizona State University) Bixby, Bixby Patrick
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 31.12.2025
• EAN: 9781009486156
• ISBN: 978-1-0-0948615-6
• Series: Elements in Beckett Studies
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Philosophy > General, dictionaries; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Philosophy: general, reference works; POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Economy, Modernism, Political Economy, Philosophy: aesthetics, Green lifestyle & self-sufficiency, Minimalist lifestyle / Simple living