Samuel Beckett's Lyric Failure - (Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics) by Mantra Mukim (Hardcover)

About the Book

Providing one of the first book-length accounts of Samuel Beckett's poetry, this book argues how Beckett's poetry reconfigures lyrical language to mark the emergence of an anti-expressive poetics.

Book Synopsis

Providing one of the first book-length accounts of Samuel Beckett's poetry, this work illustrates how Beckett's poetry, and its failures, reconfigure the lyric form. Reading Beckett alongside nineteenth and twentieth century European poets such as Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Montale, and Apollinaire, the book situates failure in the triangulation of the lyric impulse, subjectivity, and the human voice.

Beckett, in his poems, employs lyric tactics that range from deixis, parataxis, and caesura to specific kinds of timbre, resonances, and punctuations. These tactics situate the poetic voice in the liminal points between life and death, event and non-event, beginning and ending, and more broadly, between expression and failure. The book frames these liminalities under the rubric of 'lyric failure'.

Moving beyond the usual comparisons with his prose and drama, the study highlights failure as a generative force that structures Beckett's anti-expressive poetics.

Review Quotes

Beckett's famous injunction, "Fail better", has been so successful that it is now a universal catchphrase. Mantra Mukim's excellent study applies this paradoxical art of failure to Beckett's poetry by rewriting it as "Fail to the letter". His original move discloses a new grammar of the lyrical voice while deploying a whole grammatology of the Beckettian sublime.

In a series of acute formalist encounters, Samuel Beckett's Lyric Failure examines how ending, exhaustion, and failure manifest in Beckett's poetry. Working beyond the familiar paradox of failure / going on, failure is shown to be the ground and possibility of Beckett's poetry, opening to an alternative futurity.

About the Author

Mantra Mukim is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow (Eutopia-SIF) at CY Cergy Paris Université, France.