Trying to UnderstandWaiting for Godot

Adorno had such an affinity for Beckett that he dedicated his posthumously published work, Aesthetic Theory, to him. In 1961, he wrote a thoughtful—if dizzyingly complex—tribute to Beckett’s play, Endgame, a work that models many aspects of Adorno’s cultural criticism. My aim, accordingly, is to offer an Adornian reading of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot by drawing upon his critiques of music, aesthetics, and the culture industry. My goal is twofold: to offer a refreshing analysis of one of the most significant dramatic achievements of the twentieth century, and, in doing so, to demonstrate Adorno’s relevance to contemporary cultural studies by deploying multiple elements of his oeuvre

Aesthetics · Art · Chess endgame · Criticism · Linguistics · Literature · Sociology · Computer Science · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Samuel Beckett and Modernism · Theatre and Performance Studies