Acknowledgments
Introduction
Beckett's Choice
I. Entering the Literary Field
Joyce and Proust: Involuntary Epics
"It Is Not": Juxtaposition and Ethical Judgment in "Dante and the Lobster"
Versions of Modernism
II. Contact with the Outside World
Contesting "Social Reality"
"Contact with Outer Reality" in Murphy
Watt: Novel of Resistance or Accident of War?
III. Rewriting Modernism in the Nouvelles
Primitivism in the Tone of Polite Conversation
Writing and Begging in "The End"
From the Metropolis to the "Text"
Author or Writing Subject? Beckett and Postmodern Fiction
IV. Molloy (one): Molloy, the Subject
Molloy's Class Consciousness
The Production of the Story
Molloy and the Police
Subjectivity as a Modernist Universal
V. Molloy (two): Moran, the Agent
The Agent as Storyteller
"Strong Enough at Last to Act No More"
The Terms of the Story: Agent, Voice, Purpose
Structures without Agents: Beckett and the Postwar Critique of Narrative
VI. A Contest of Nightmares: The Unnamable and 1984
"Incomprehensible Uneasiness" in the Void
The Flâneur in a Jar
The Reinvention of the New and the Aesthetic of Failure
Nightmare of Commitment: Orwell's "Inside the Whale" and 1984
Epilogue
Engagement, Écriture, Autonomy: The Displacement of
Politics in Postwar Critical Theory
Notes
Works Cited
Index