Beckett's political imagination

Description

"There is, seemingly, little to say about Beckett's politics. Many interviews and memoirs portray a writer peculiarly unqualified for political activity, ill-at-ease with mundane realities, and more comfortable with philosophical abstraction. Some have celebrated his apparent detachment from the political world: notably, on the occasion of Beckett's seventieth birthday, Emil Cioran paid tribute to a figure living 'parallel to time,' gifted with the ability of making others 'understand history as a dimension man could have dispensed with'. Such established consensus, however, flies in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary. Beckett's texts, with their numerous portrayals of violence, torture, dispossession, internment and subjugation, harbour a real political immediacy, while his notebooks, manuscripts and correspondence reveal a fine and astute observer of political symbols, attuned to the long history of political myths in the Irish Free State, Nazi Germany, and France in the aftermath of the Second World War and during the Algerian War of Independence"--

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