Quotidian Beckett

Art of Everyday Life

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Samuel Beckett was a writer of the everyday. Despite his association with the literary avant-garde and his commitment to an increasingly austere aesthetic, his writing betrays an enduring preoccupation with the quotidian rhythms of modern life, including the experiences of boredom, routine, habit, and consumption. Quotidian Beckett: Art of Everyday Life explores the writer's evolving response to this realm of experience, which philosophers and sociologists have paradoxically described as both everywhere and nowhere, obvious and enigmatic. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre's influential theories of everyday life, the Element demonstrates how Beckett's writing, by producing forms that resist transparency and closure, invites us to see the mundane in unfamiliar, unsettling, and politically charged ways. In this regard, his artistic achievement lies in rendering the elusiveness of the quotidian with a vividness that other modes of discourse seldom achieve.