Samuel Beckett and Anthropomorphic Insolence

Abstract

Samuel Beckett's writings display a contradictory attitude to Romanticism, their incipient lyricism ruthlessly constrained and the "impulse to animise" rejected in favour of a view of nature as atomistic, mineral and organic. Beckett's distrust of the dictum that "man is the measure of all things" leads in to a sustained critique of the anthropomorphic impulse and of any epistemology (including Romanticism) that thus asserts the self. I then critique, from the perspective of , two Romantic tenets: "mythical fancy" and the transcendental impulse. The essay concludes where it begins, with Beckett's ambiguous attraction to a tradition he rejected, this constituting his experience of the romantic agony.