Beckett’s “Masters”: Pedagogical Sadism, Foreign Language Primers, Self-Translation

Here, Cordingley concentrates on the new perspectives Samuel Beckett developed in his French fiction on the question of habit and originality--a concern established in his first published monograph, Proust (1931). She focuss on Beckett's exploitation of the nexus between pedagogy and language and his proliferating figures of masters and students, tracking his representation of foreign language learning and the rhetoric of the foreign language primer, from Watt through the post-World War II novels. By using How It Is as a prism through which to view earlier novels, one can more clearly perceive Beckett's growing concern with the psychological processes that perpetuate the exchange of pedagogical voices and how these processes impact his bilingual writing. How It Is offers Beckett's most sustained reflection on his own bilingualism, where the issue of repetition is explicitly staged to resemble, and parody, his practice and poetics of self-translation. To substantiate this argument she offers offer a genealogy of the methods of foreign language instruction in Latin and French to which Beckett had been exposed.