THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Samuel Beckett

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the life and work of Samuel Beckett, with a focus on his play Waiting for Godot. We begin by considering Beckett’s place in literary history as an experimentalist trying to find a way to write after Joyce. Then I consider his biography in more detail, including his relationship with Joyce, his work with the French Resistance, and his turn to both minimalism and the French language. Finally, I read Waiting for Godot itself, his most famous play, as a drama of “posts”: post-Christian, post-Romantic, post-political, post-theatrical, post-modernist, and post-life, with nonetheless a minimal ethic counseling us against total despair. Don’t miss my shocking theory about the true identities of Pozzo and Lucky. This episode is free to all. If you enjoy it, please offer a paid subscription, especially if you want access to our summer reading of Ulysses and Middlemarch. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is here:

Samuel Beckett: Not a Soul in Sight

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