The Continuities of Late Modernism: Before and after Beckett

Abstract

This chapter presents an extension of the scope of fictional writings that have been previously considered under the aegis of late modernism and some dialogical qualification of the historicizing framework implied by that term. A key development in recent criticism and the historical study of modernism is the steady increase in the number, complexity, and specificity of narratives about modernism’s development. Moreover, a certain historiographic ‘constructivism’ has become necessary to account for and mediate between overlapping, complementary, and somewhat contradictory histories of modernist culture with different national, linguistic, temporal, gender, and ethnic boundaries. This chapter places new emphasis on the positive role of late modernism in bridging the literary changes of mid-century, and accordingly downplay the idea of a putative ‘postmodernism’ on the other shore of a late modernist ‘transition’. It argues that late modernism embodies a paradoxically enduring mode of progress-in-ending.

Vegetating Life and the Spirit of Modernism in Kafka and Beckett

“…113 Despite his narrow periodization of late modernism as the late 1920s to the 1930s, Tyrus Miller recognises the important point that 'in such works the vectors of despair and utopia, the compulsion to decline and the impulse to renewal, are not just related; they are practically indistinguishable'. 114 Late modernism therefore formalises the abortive but enduring kernel that exists within the spirit of modernism; it enacts the chronic belatedness and persistence endemic to its oppositional, experimental forbearer. Kafka and Beckett invoke and perform this sense of protracted failure present in their own supposed modernist artistic sensibility to expose the burdensome, atrophied side of its dynamism.…”