Reaching out to the World in Samuel Beckett's Late Short Stories
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.6471Keywords:
Samuel Beckett, the short story, experimental fiction, stylistic austerity, literature and societyAbstract
Although the short story lacks the novel’s capacity to construct a broad picture of society and does not offer the possibility of interconnecting different perspectives to act as a chronicle or to draw a wide canvas of the social arena, it remains an apt form for evoking the unsaid and, in doing so, encapsulating the spirit of an age in a few words. By examining Samuel Beckett’s late prose pieces, this article aims to assess the potential of the experimental short story as a marker of contemporary times. In this analysis, Beckett is revealed as an unconventional writer who could, nevertheless, capture the mindset of an anxious age. Additionally, Beckett’s contribution to the genre of short fiction will be explored.
Downloads
References
Beckett, Samuel. Disjecta. Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Calder, 1983.
Beckett, Samuel. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. The Black Cat P, 1992.
Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989, edited by Stan E. Gontarski, Grove, 1995.
Beckett, Samuel. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1966-1989. Vol. IV, edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016.
Beevers, John. “The Short Story: What Is it Exactly, What Do We Want to Do with it, and How Do we Intend to Do it?” The Short Story, edited by Ailsa Cox, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, pp. 11-26.
Bell, Julia and Jackie Gay. “Introduction.” England Calling. 24 Stories for the 21st Century, edited by Julia Bell and Jackie Gay, Phoenix, 2001.
Boulter, Jonathan. Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett’s Short Prose. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474430272
Boxall, Peter. “Still Stirrings. Beckett’s Prose from Texts for Nothing to Stirrings Still.” The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, edited by Dirk Van Hulle, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 33-47. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139871525.006
Brienza, Susan D. Samuel Beckett’s New Worlds. Style in Metafiction. University of Oklahoma P, 1987.
Cochran, Robert. Samuel Beckett: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twaine Publishers, 1991.
Cohn, Ruby. A Beckett Canon. The University of Michigan P, 2005.
Eagleton, Terry. “Introduction.” Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution, by Pascale Casanova. Verso, 2006, pp. 1-9.
Esslin, Martin. “Patterns of Rejection. Sex and Love in Beckett’s Universe.” Women in Beckett. Performance and Critical Perspectives, edited by Linda Ben-Zvi, University of Illinois P, 1990, pp. 61-67.
Gontarski, Stan E. Beckett Matters. Essays on Beckett’s Late Modernism. Edinburgh UP, 2016. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474414418
Houston Jones, David. Samuel Beckett and Testimony. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Hunter, Adrian. The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English. Cambridge UP, 2007. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511611360
Hunter, Adrian. “The Short Story and the Difficulty of Modernism.” Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Short Story in English, edited by Jorge Sacido, Rodopi, 2012, pp. 29-46. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401208321_003
Ingham, Heather. A History of the Irish Short Story. Cambridge UP, 2009.
Knowlson, James and John Pilling. Frescoes of the Skull. The Latter Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett. Grove, 1980.
Larriere, Claire. “The Future of the Short Story: A Tentative Approach.” The Tales We Tell. Perspectives on the Short Story, edited by Barbara Lounsberry, et al., Greenwood P, 1998, pp. 195-199.
Leeder, Natalie. Freedom and Negativity in Beckett and Adorno. Something or Nothing. Rowman and Littlefield, 2017.
Lodge, David. “Some Ping Understood.” Encounter (February), 1968, pp. 85-89.
March-Russell, Paul. The Short Story. An Introduction. Edinburgh UP, 2009. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748632145
McMullan, Anna. Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama. Routledge, 2010.
Miller, Tyrus. “Politics.” A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, edited by David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar, Blackwell, 2006, pp. 29-38. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470996331.ch4
Nixon, Mark. “Preface.” Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, 1950-1976, by Samuel Beckett. Faber, 2010, pp. vii-xxiv.
Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminacy. Princeton UP, 1981.
Pritchett, V. S. “Introduction.” The Oxford Book of Short Stories, edited by V. S. Pritchett, Oxford UP, 1981, pp. xi-xiv.
Pilling, John. “On not being there: Going on without in Beckett.” Beckett and Nothing. Trying to Understand Beckett, edited by Daniela Caselli, Manchester UP, 2010, pp. 20-27.
Pilling, John. Samuel Beckett’s ‘More Pricks than Kicks’. In a Strait of Two Wills Continuum, 2011.
Renton, Andrew. “Disabled Figures: From the Residua to Stirrings Still.” The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, edited by John Pilling, Cambridge UP, 1994, pp. 167-183. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521413664.009
Sheehan, Paul. “Modernism: Dublin/Paris/London.” Samuel Beckett in Context, edited by Anthony Uhlmann, Cambridge UP, 2013, pp. 139-159.
Stewart, Paul. “Ping”, The Facts on File Companion to the British Short Story. Andrew Maunder, ed. Facts on File, 2007, pp. 336-337.
Verhulst, Pim. “Chronology of Beckett’s Writings.” The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, edited by Dirk Van Hulle, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. xxvii-xxxii.
Zaccaria, Paola. “Fizzles by Samuel Beckett: The Failure of the Dream of a Never-ending Verticality.” Rethinking Beckett. A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Lance St. John Butler and Robin J. Davis, Macmillan, 1990, pp. 105-123. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20561-5_6
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 José Francisco Fernández Sánchez

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The authors retain copyright of articles and authorize Journal of English Studies the first publication. They are free to share, redistribute, and/or reprint the article without obtaining permission from the publisher as long as they give appropriate credit to the editor and the journal.
Self-archiving is allowed too. In fact, it is recommendable to deposit a PDF version of the paper in academic and/or institutional repositories.
It is recommended to include the DOI number.
This journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International LicenseFunding data
-
Junta de Andalucía
Grant numbers ERDF 2021-2027. Programme: 54.A.