Samuel Beckett wrote Watt in occupied France. Its defining theme would be complicity. From the Watt manuscripts, we can glean insights into what Beckett was thinking as he tried to work through the rise of fascism and France’s capitulation to it. Central to that attempt was an artistic dialogue – vigorously comic but also rigorously ethical – with W. B. Yeats. Watt is, among other things, an Irish Big House novel, and it revolves around the problem of disposing of a landlord’s leftovers by way of a dog – or colony of famished dogs – bred for that purpose. This has been read as a parody of liberal political economy with its founding problem of waste. 

This course will study Irish modernism, liberal colonialism, fascism, and Zionism, by way of a close study of Watt and its manuscripts (housed at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas).