Beckett and Beyond (review)

[...] while there is merit in bringing together work on Beckett's prose work alongside papers on his plays, the lack of effort in arranging the essays by related topics also exacerbates the inconsistent quality of the collection and elides the important differences that Beckett himself saw in his roles as a fiction writer and playwright. Under the dire influence of Joyce's shadow, says Dettmar, Beckett launched in a 1956 interview a "paradigm for reading twentieth-century literature and writing twentieth-century literary history" (86) by providing a comparative schematic for interpreting his own work as the opposite of Joyce's (the famous tag line of the interview is Beckett's comment that Joyce is "tending toward omniscience, I'm working with impotence").