Samuel Beckett and Cultural Nationalism

Abstract

Drawing on evidence from his published works, manuscripts, and correspondence, Samuel Beckett and Cultural Nationalism explores Beckett's engagement with the theme of cultural nationalism throughout his writing life, revealing the various ways in which he sought to challenge culturally nationalist conceptions of art and literature, while never embracing a cosmopolitan approach. The Element shows how, in his pre-Second World War writings, Beckett sought openly to mock Irish nationalist ideas of culture and language, but that, in so doing, he failed to avoid what he himself described as a 'clot of prejudices'. In his post-war works in French and English, however, following time spent in Nazi Germany in 1936-7 as well as in the French Resistance during the Second World War, Beckett began to take a new approach to ideas of national-cultural affiliation, at the heart of which was a conception of the human as a citizen of nowhere.

Cultural nationalism and its effect on Chinese higher education: continuity and variation

“…It was manifested in Germany in the early nineteenth century as the understanding that "it is solely by means of the common [cultural] trait of Germanness that we can avert the downfall of our nation threatened by its confluence with foreign peoples and once more win back a self that is self-supporting and incapable of any form of dependency" (Fichte, 2008, p. 11). A similar form of cultural nationalism that is closely tied to shared origins and culture, which indicated a closed membership, played a significant role in nationalist movements that established new nation-states in Europe such as Italy, Germany, and Ireland in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries (Kohn, 1967;Weller, 2021). Currently, cultural nationalism as a theoretical framework has been applied in various disciplines (e.g., political sciences and cultural studies) to examine how it is manifested in many recent movements across nation-states in the west, including the fundamental British values in the United Kingdom, the insistence of cultural unity in France, the white Christian Americans' cultural supremacy in the United States, and the requirement of ethnic minorities' cultural identification for social solidarity in Russia (Lin, 2023;Yusupova, 2018).…”