Plays as linguistic games: a literal interpretation of Beckett’s postwar theatre

Abstract

In this article, I propose a ‘literal’ interpretation of Beckett’s postwar theatre, which allows to give importance to an ‘aesthetic of sound’ in which a work of art finds its own sense in the fact that it is a linguistic game created by an author. After 1945, the author becomes unable to speak about the profound themes of the Western tradition, but can write plays in which there is the configuration of an aesthetic of the small talk, to be analyzed according to a hermeneutics of superficiality.