Tomáš Koblížek Book order

Proceedings of the XIth Prague Interpretation Colloquium (April 11-13, 2016) commemorating Samuel Beckett’s 110th anniversary, focuses on a topic which has played a crucial role both in Beckett’s work and in his published reflections: the function of form in art. From Beckett’s perspective, as presented in the prevailing interpretations, the form can serve to expose the chaotic nature of the world we live in or to construe an artificial order and impose it on (our picture of) the world. The latter is typical of great literary manipulators and “masters of their material,” while the former amounts to resigning upon any kind of “mastery” and engaging in a never-ending search for a form that would not conceal the true nature of the work of art as part and product of the universal chaos and that would let the mess speak.

The influence and reputation of Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, is easily comparable to the impact of groundbreaking theoretical texts. Numerous philosophers, aestheticians and theorists of literature, music, or visual arts have been induced by this short story by J.L. Borges to reconsider the status of the literary work of art, to rethink the relationship between work and text. The essays collected here move from analyses of the identity of the literary work of art, as it is explicitly established by Borges’ narrator, to arguments that simply employ the Menard case as an opportunity for discussing broader issues of literary studies and the philosophy of literature. Selected essays even abandon the field of literature altogether, moving on to analogous issues in the theory of visual arts and music.