{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.025110132158590308, 'fraction_numerical': 0.006167400881057269, 'mean_word_length': 5.397183098591549, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Falsifying Beckett: Essays on Archives, Philosophy and Methodology in Beckett Studies

How does the dialectic of archive and interpretation operate? Is it hierarchical? What do we make of an archival ethic of interpretation? These questions are brought to the fore by Matthew Feldman’s Falsifying Beckett, a series of articles written and published individually in the last decade and brought together under one cover by strong connecting threads like the Popperian falsifiability of interpretation, an archival methodology, and a complex history of Samuel Beckett’s tryst with philosophy. As Erik Tonning, another eminent Beckettian, underlines in his foreword, Feldman’s book advocates ‘theorizing from a position of empirical strength’ (p. 13). It uses Karl Popper’s framework of ‘falsifiability’ as an epitome of empirical knowledge to engage in a methodological polemic with the philosophical criticism on Beckett which for him is unfalsifiable, if not ahistorical at times. We can think of a continuum between Falsifying Beckett and Feldman’s first monograph Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’ (2006) which was responsible for introducing what is now called the ‘archival turn’ in Beckett Studies. As such, it drew our attention to Beckett’s ‘Philosophy and Psychology Notes’, taken most intensely between 1932 and 1938. Beckett Studies is currently overwhelmed by a pervasive interest in the so-called grey cannon with the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project in full swing, three volumes of letters already published with the final one pending and many more unpublished stories, diaries and notebooks seeing the light of the day. To read Falsifying Beckett in this critical milieu, in which the intended tectonic shifts have already reshaped the field, is thus a rewarding experience. It helps us think through the archival and historicist claims from a historical vantage point in which it has become a governing ideology. The philosophical orientation, which motivates this incredibly lucid and incisive book, is what I would call an ‘Analytic’ attitude to knowledge and truth in which they are seen as being mutually complementary and dependent on correspondence with the world of facts. Hence, the turn to Textual Practice