Abstract
This conclusion calls for further research into how modernism’s intermediaries target audiences in ways that affect its changing social positionings, how its publishers, editors, dealers, commentators, and celebrity endorsers appeal to specific races, genders, classes, and sexes in ways that shape its social relevance today. The need for such research is highlighted through a brief discussion of the publishing problems encountered by Lucy Ellmann’s 2019 novel Ducks, Newburyport, problems thrown up by the social and economic imperatives of Bloomsbury and Galley Beggar Press, as well as through a look at the ways Beckett’s “fail better” line has both been appropriated to consumerist self-help logics and re-purposed to encourage struggling, even failing causes such as the protests over the US police murder of George Floyd.
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Notes
- 1.
See Mohammed Aïssaoui, “Gallimard rachète les mythiques Éditions de Minuit,” Le Figaro, 24 June 2021, https://www.lefigaro.fr/medias/gallimard-rachete-les-editions-de-minuit-20210623.
- 2.
On Bloomsbury’s refusal to publish the novel, see Alex Preston, “Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann review—pushes narrative to its limits: An Ohio housewife ruminates on her past in a complex novel made up of ‘just eight near-endless sentences,’” The Guardian, 15 July 2019, theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/15/ducks-newburyport-by-lucy-ellmann-review. All operational details for both publishers are drawn from their respective websites, bloomsbury.com and galleybeggar.co.uk.
- 3.
“Why we have a donation button,” galleybeggar.co.uk/donate.
- 4.
Beckett, Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 81.
- 5.
Radcliffe quoted in Mark O’Connell, “The Stunning Success of ‘Fail Better’: How Samuel Beckett Became Silicon Valley’s Life Coach,” Slate, 29 January 2014, slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/01/samuel_beckett_s_quote_fail_better_becomes_the_mantra_of_silicon_valley.html. On the popularity of the “fail better” aphorism on Amazon, see Ned Beauman, “Fail Worse,” The New Inquiry, 9 February 2012, https://thenewinquiry.com/fail-worse/.
- 6.
Across the social sciences, a growing body of literature is beginning to explore the pernicious psychological and social effects of self-help literature. See for instance Erik Mygind du Plessis, “How to Perpetuate Problems of the Self: Applying Foucault’s Concept of Problematization to Popular Self-help Books on Work and Career,” Culture and Organization 27, no. 1 (April 2020), 33–50. Sarah Riley, Adrienne Evans, Emma Anderson, Martine Robson, “The Gendered Nature of Self-Help,” Feminism and Psychology 29, no. 1 (2019): 3–18. Maria Adamson and Suvi Salmenniemi, “‘The Bottom Line Is That the Problem Is You’: Aesthetic Labour, Postfeminism and Subjectivity in Russian Self-Help Literature,” in Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism, ed. Ana Sofia Elias, Rosalind Gill, Christina Scharff (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 301–16. Scott McLean and Laurie Vermeylen, “From Getting Ahead to Getting Back on One’s Feet: Performing Masculinity as a Self-Help Reader,” Men and Masculinities 22, no. 4 (2019): 716–37.
- 7.
Watt, Beckett and Contemporary Irish Writing, 3–7. On resonances between Waiting for Godot and Covid-19, see for instance Herb Trix, “COVID & the Arts: Waiting for Godot,” wvik.org, 22 October 2020, https://www.wvik.org/post/covid-arts-waiting-godot#stream/0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=10&v=90G_dxqqJs&feature=emb_logo&fbclid=IwAR2R_Agkt10NBY7RViJG7gGTvD1CKTRbsXG38PqwD2CVDFfVbK5k6yiWSPg.
- 8.
Cornel West, interview by Anderson Cooper, CNN, 30 May 2020.
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Wolterman, N. (2022). Re-targeting Modernism. In: Beckett’s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism . New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05650-5_6
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