„Samuel Beckett’s Decadent Turn”
S.E. Gontarski (Florida State University)
translated by Katarzyna Kręglewska
The full version of this article is available in Polish in the printed version of Tekstualia and in the on-line subscription.
„Samuel Beckett’s Decadent Turn” re-examines and reassesses Beckett’s relationship with certain experimental and countercultural forms of and movements in art often called „Decadent” – from his running afoul of the Irish Censorship of Publications Acts in the 1930s to the 1950s, through his search for „literature in the pornography, or beneath the pornography” in his translations of the Marquis de Sade and his battles with the Lord Chamberlain in the mid-1950s over the London productions of his fi rst two plays, to his close professional and personal associations with publishers who celebrated the work of the demimonde. Much of that term encompasses an opening to the fullness of human experience denied in previous centuries, and much of that has been sexual or decadent. Beckett’s aesthetics emerged from such encounters and those associations continued to inform his work and to develop into experimental modes that upended literary models and middle-class values, an aesthetics that, furthermore, has inspired any number of subsequent visual and performance artists.
The sample of Polish version of this article is available here: https://tekstualia.pl/pl/numery/beckettwpolsce
