Beckett's Late Stage

de Rhys Tranter

Beckett?s Late Stage' reexamines the Nobel laureate?s post-war prose and drama in the light of contemporary trauma theory. Through a series of sustained close-readings, the study demonstrates how the comings and goings of Beckett?s prose unsettles the Western philosophical tradition; it reveals how Beckett?s live theatrical productions are haunted by the rehearsal of traumatic repetition, and asks what his ghostly radio recordings might signal for twentieth-century modernity. Drawing from psychoanalytic and poststructuralist traditions, Beckett?s Late Stage explores how the traumatic symptom allows us to rethink the relationship between language, meaning, and identity after 1945.