RT Article
T1 The Pretty Quietist Pater: Samuel Beckett's Molloy and the Aesthetics of Quietism
JF Literature and theology
VO 30
IS 4
SP 439
OP 455
A1 Wimbush, Andy
LA English
PB Oxford University Press
YR 2016
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1663447969
AB Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of 'quietism' in Samuel Beckett's personal and artistic development during the 1930s. This article extends this analysis by showing how the 'pretty quietist Pater' recited by Moran in Molloy (1951/55) was not Beckett's invention but rather borrowed from Jean de La Bruyère's satirical Dialogues sur le quiétisme (1699). The article also shows how Molloy, like Beckett's early novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, explores quietism as an aesthetic framework that Beckett drew from André Gide's critical writing on Fyodor Dostoevsky.
DO 10.1093/litthe/frv025