Chronicles of Disorder

David Weisberg is Assistant Professor of English at Wesleyan University.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionBeckett's ChoiceI. Entering the Literary FieldJoyce and Proust: Involuntary Epics"It Is Not": Juxtaposition and Ethical Judgment in "Dante and the Lobster"Versions of ModernismII. Contact with the Outside WorldContesting "Social Reality""Contact with Outer Reality" in MurphyWatt: Novel of Resistance or Accident of War?III. Rewriting Modernism in the NouvellesPrimitivism in the Tone of Polite ConversationWriting and Begging in "The End"From the Metropolis to the "Text"Author or Writing Subject? Beckett and Postmodern FictionIV. Molloy (one): Molloy, the SubjectMolloy's Class ConsciousnessThe Production of the StoryMolloy and the PoliceSubjectivity as a Modernist UniversalV. Molloy (two): Moran, the AgentThe Agent as Storyteller"Strong Enough at Last to Act No More"The Terms of the Story: Agent, Voice, PurposeStructures without Agents: Beckett and the Postwar Critique of NarrativeVI. A Contest of Nightmares: The Unnamable and 1984"Incomprehensible Uneasiness" in the VoidThe Flâneur in a JarThe Reinvention of the New and the Aesthetic of FailureNightmare of Commitment: Orwell's "Inside the Whale" and 1984EpilogueEngagement, écriture, Autonomy: The Displacement of Politics in Postwar Critical TheoryNotesWorks CitedIndex

"This is a smart, original contribution to Beckett studies and to the study of literary modernism and postmodernism. It calls attention to the ways in which acceptance of a dominant critical paradigm has caused us to misread the cultural politics of a major author's work. It gathers energy toward its final, startling juxtaposition of Beckett and Orwell, which so powerfully epitomizes the argument sustained throughout the book about Beckett's ability to 'overcome his interwar ambivalence to a modernist ideal of "aesthetic autonomy" by constructing a narrative form that consciously exploits the contradictions of such an ideal.'" — Ann L. Ardis, author of New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism"Weisberg's contribution lies not only in his clear exposition of how Beckett's work is embedded within the polemics of his own day but in his mapping of a new trajectory from an early Beckett whose work suffers from 'contradictory and ambivalent allegiances,' to a later Beckett who finds his metier in expressing those very contradictions." — Joseph Natoli, author of Mots D'Ordre: Disorder in Literary Worlds