Beckett after Wittgenstein

Among the best-represented authors in Samuel Becketts library was Ludwig Wittgenstein, yet the philosophers relevance to the Nobel laureates work is scarcely acknowledged and seldom elucidated. Beckett after Wittgenstein is the first book to examine Becketts formative encounters with, and profound affinities to, Wittgensteins thought, style, and character.

While a number of influential critics, including the philosopher Alain Badiou, have discerned a transition in Becketts work beginning in the late 1950s, Furlani is the first to identify and clarify how this change occurs in conjunction with the writers sustained engagement with Wittgensteins thought on, for example, language, cognition, subjectivity, alterity, temporality, belief, hermeneutics, logic, and perception. Drawing on a wealth of Becketts archival materials, much of it unpublished, Furlanis study reveals the extent to which Wittgenstein fostered Becketts views and emboldened his purposes. See more