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Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive. Seán Kennedy and Katherine Weiss, eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Pp. x + 226. $85.00 (cloth).
In recent years, Beckett studies have moved into a new phase. A young generation of scholars have abandoned the theoretical turn that dominated work on Beckett from the late 1980s onwards, and taken it in a historicist and positivist direction. This move has been important and invigorating. It has been fuelled by the emergence of the major Beckett biographies, chiefly Knowlson's, and the recognition that the archive contains a mass of unpublished material still requiring scholarly treatment, publication, and assessment. It also owes a good deal to slightly earlier historicizations of modernists once considered beyond the purview of the historicisms, especially Joyce. Kennedy and Weiss's volume is a major contribution to the new scholarship and, if the same cannot be said of every essay in it, then that is finally instructive, too.
The best work here is undoubtedly materialist in principle, that is, it works outward from what it takes in the first instance to be material givens, be they historical or archival. Most of the relevant contributors do what they have already proved themselves to be very good at doing. Among the archival scholars, Mark Nixon continues not only to thicken his account of Beckett in Germany in the years 1936-37 but, increasingly, to meditate on the emergent Beckettian historical and political thought it appears to suggest. Dirk Van Hulle reflects with customary panache on the implications of certain aspects of genetic methodology (the concepts of "foreshadowing," "backshadowing," and "sideshadowing") as indicating that we might start to treat Beckett"s whole oeuvre "as one long textual genesis," but also one in which "any document can momentarily become the center" (179). Among the historicists, Kennedy writes compellingly of the Beckett of Texts for Nothing (and after) as haunted by...