Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Modernism, Ethics and the Political Imagination Tragic-Dialectical-Perfectionism: On Beckett’s Endgame

Modernism, Ethics and the Political Imagination : Tragic-Dialectical-Perfectionism: On Beckett’s... [This chapter examines Stanley Cavell’s suggestion – put forward in his Carus Lectures of 1988 – that Samuel Beckett’s Endgame can be read as a work which embodies and develops the idea of Emersonian moral perfectionism. While this suggestion is never fully substantiated by Cavell himself, it is, as I hope to demonstrate here, possible to provide an account of what a perfectionist Endgame might look like by drawing on a range of Cavell’s texts, from his early essay on Endgame through to his recent study Cities of Words. In the second part of the chapter, I turn the tables somewhat. After demarcating some of the social limits of Cavell’s ethical outlook, I ask what it might mean to rediscover perfectionism in a more politicized form – something which I attempt to do via an exploration of the tragic dimensions of Beckett’s play.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Modernism, Ethics and the Political Imagination Tragic-Dialectical-Perfectionism: On Beckett’s Endgame

Download PDF
23 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/springer-journals/modernism-ethics-and-the-political-imagination-tragic-dialectical-L9GaD6fKJQ

References (0)

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Copyright
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017. The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
ISBN
978-1-137-55502-1
Pages
67 –90
DOI
10.1057/978-1-137-55503-8_4
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[This chapter examines Stanley Cavell’s suggestion – put forward in his Carus Lectures of 1988 – that Samuel Beckett’s Endgame can be read as a work which embodies and develops the idea of Emersonian moral perfectionism. While this suggestion is never fully substantiated by Cavell himself, it is, as I hope to demonstrate here, possible to provide an account of what a perfectionist Endgame might look like by drawing on a range of Cavell’s texts, from his early essay on Endgame through to his recent study Cities of Words. In the second part of the chapter, I turn the tables somewhat. After demarcating some of the social limits of Cavell’s ethical outlook, I ask what it might mean to rediscover perfectionism in a more politicized form – something which I attempt to do via an exploration of the tragic dimensions of Beckett’s play.]

Published: Dec 16, 2016

Keywords: Moral Life; Sorites Paradox; Moral Perfectionism; European Philosopher; Critical Gravity

There are no references for this article.