Waiting for Something

Layer III

Scholarly Journals

The critical conversation: who named it, who resisted the name, and why it still matters.

  1. [01]

    Martin Esslin

    The Theatre of the Absurd

    Anchor Books, 1961

    Names the movement. Argues these playwrights express Camus's sense of the absurd not by discussing it, but by abandoning rational devices and discursive thought on stage.

  2. [02]

    Martin Esslin

    "The Theatre of the Absurd"

    The Tulane Drama Review 4.4, 1960

    The earlier journal essay that first floated the term, reading Beckett, Adamov, Ionesco, and Genet together.

  3. [03]

    Theodor W. Adorno

    "Trying to Understand Endgame"

    New German Critique 26, 1982 (orig. 1961)

    Rejects the 'absurd' label as too comfortable. Endgame is not about meaninglessness in general but about the catastrophe of meaning after Auschwitz.

  4. [04]

    Ruby Cohn

    Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut

    Rutgers UP, 1962

    Foregrounds Beckett's comedy — music hall, clowning, and wordplay — as central rather than incidental.

  5. [05]

    Jean-Paul Sartre

    Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr

    Gallimard, 1952

    An existential biography reading Genet's life as a free choice to become the thief society named him.

  6. [06]

    Alain Robbe-Grillet

    "Samuel Beckett, or Presence on the Stage"

    Critique, 1953

    Argues Godot's characters simply are there — the theatre's pure presence — without hidden symbolic depth.

  7. [07]

    James Knowlson

    Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett

    Bloomsbury, 1996

    The authorized biography, linking Beckett's wartime Resistance experience and exile to the waiting of Godot.

  8. [08]

    Kenneth Tynan / Eugène Ionesco

    The "London Controversy"

    The Observer, 1958

    Tynan accused Ionesco of escaping into private nightmares; Ionesco replied that political theatre was the real cliché. A defining debate over art and commitment.