The Yearbook of English Studies

Abstract:

Samuel Beckett is a writer peculiarly attuned to the sound of the environment and to the perceptual processes by which ambient sound is registered and acknowledged in the act of listening. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Beckett's writing of the 1950s and 1960s, and in his Trilogy in particular. Lending a critical ear to these prose works reveals Beckett as what we would now call a sound artist. He was a near contemporary of John Cage, with whom he shared an alertness to the quiet events of everyday soundscapes and a concomitant interest in the formulation of a phenomenology of listening.