Modernism, postcolonialism, and the experience of place: a study of Samuel Beckett and Derek Walcott
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This investigation started with its author's fascination with 20 th century literary modernity. In this context, Samuel Beckett appears to be a writer who pushes the limits of modernity to the edge reinforcing, on the one hand, the tremendous human empowerment that modernity has brought about, and, on the other hand, exposing the deadlock that modernity has reached. Alongside with this, the rise of what is currently labelled as “postcolonial literature” has challenged the old way of approaching the literary phenomenon by adding a new dimension to 20th century modernity. The West Indian experience in particular has proved to be equally fascinating especially since this literature seems to transgress European exhaustion and to refresh a reservoir of ideas which, in the European context, as Beckett consistently shows us, has reached a state of fin-de-siècle decadence. Therefore, this study investigates the shared logic of modernism and postcolonialism under one aspect alone, namely that of “place”. It is the contention of this study that literature evolves around a number of fundamental themes, place being one of them. To this purpose, a comparison between Samuel Beckett and Derek Walcott is, in many ways, more obvious than it may appear initially. As a writer, Derek Walcott represents a unique blend of European tradition and postcolonial innovation. On the other hand, more recently, Samuel Beckett's work, alongside with the work of many other Irish writers, is being reassessed as part of an Irish postcolonial canon. These initial concerns are being addressed in Part One of this study. Part Two looks at the common metaphor “of place as woman”, shared by both modernism and postcolonialism, against the background of Freud's archetypal thinking. Part Three and Part Four discuss the ideas of attachment to place and the need to escape the limitations of place along the lines of Cartesianism, phenomenology, and utopian thinking. The last part of this study, Part Five, discusses theatre as the public place of literature. Through theatre, both these authors take on the role of cultural animators and, as it turns out, theatre becomes the battleground of a cultural debate similar to the one initiated by another great 20th century playwright, namely Bertold Brecht. Finally, this study tries to show that the things that unite us are definitely far more important than the things that divide us and that European modernity and postcolonialism never undermine each other, but, quite on the contrary, play a reciprocal role in the construction of their respective identities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".