Document Type
Review
Abstract
Having previously published a book on the self and text in the works of Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett, David Houston Jones turns his attention to the latter's important but generally underexamined prose fiction. Moreover, as Jones argues, this work has been misread or underappreciated when it has been considered at all, especially in terms of the tremendous and careful work Beckett does to show without showing the horrors of the Holocaust. In the author's words, the concern "is not to document the differing understandings of language and identity in post-structuralist as opposed to humanist thought, but to examine some of the most revealing encounters between Beckettian testimony and recent rethinkings of human epistemology, in particular the emergence of the critical categories of the posthuman and the inhuman" (16-7). What becomes clear in reading Jones's new work, Samuel Beckett and Testimony, is that both the source and the analysis forcefully and yet subtly call for and demonstrate the need for the interpretive work of reading. The subtlety is perhaps the most laudable since Beckett's prose more than his plays play with the indeterminacy of language and the resultant status of any signifier as a metaphor for something, if not some thing.
Repository Citation
Ouellette, Marc A.. "Review of Samuel Beckett and Testimony, by David Houston Jones." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 14, no. 2, 2014, pp. 1–5. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol14/iss2/9