Abstract/Summary

Beckett scholarship has, on the whole, neglected to probe whether there is anything deeper at work behind the persistent references to Romanticism in Beckett’s writing, preferring instead to follow the general consensus that it barely operates on the periphery of Beckett’s creative practice. Yet ‘still today, when I walk there, I find its vestiges’,1 vestiges which prove vital to casting new light on how and why Beckett wrote the way he did, in structural and formal as well as thematic terms. In 2004, C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski noted that a ‘good study of the Romantic impulse in SB’s writings, revealing unexpected insights into a tradition vehemently rejected but never quite denied, is currently lacking’.2 Three years later, Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, editing the special issue to Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui dedicated to Beckett and Romanticism, wrote that the issue ‘tries to give an impetus to the study of this complex theme’.3 Enoch Brater reiterated the call again in 2011: ‘Yet how Beckett liberates himself from parody to confront the romanticism inherent in his own “profounds of mind” is a story of artistic maturity still waiting to be told’.4 This thesis attempts to answer these calls in a way which discovers Beckett’s Romanticism not as counterintuitive to his poetics of the unsaid but rather as directly connected to it. His Romanticism plays a central role in his artistic maturity into minimalism and silence.