SOURCE: Kennedy, Andrew. “Beckett and the Modern/Postmodern Debate.” Samuel Beckett Today 6 (1997): 255-65.

In the following essay, Kennedy argues that although Beckett's plays have postmodernist elements, they are fundamentally different from true postmodern works.

Our general topic (at the Strasbourg colloquium, April 1996) invited paradox. For the title itself invokes a set of binary critical terms that Beckett never used, and might well have abhorred, as he had a clear perception of the superficiality and cramping effect of critical terms.¹ Moreover, Beckett critics have also tended to avoid our current terminology of ‘isms’: a quick check through a representative collection of books on Beckett shows that the postmodern debate itself tended to be avoided—except by Ihab Hassan, note 7—until the appearance of the New Casebooks critical collection on Waiting for Godot and Endgame in 1992, illuminatingly edited by Steven Connor and one of my starting points here.² Even studies...