Labor, Idleness, and Colonial Modern Fiction: Reading Claude McKay, Yi Sang, and Samuel Beckett in Relation

This dissertation addresses the entanglement of work, identity, aesthetics, and geopolitics in the writings of three modernist authors: Claude McKay (1890-1948), Yi Sang (1910-1937), and Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). It focuses in particular on these writers’ explorations of idleness in their narratives, both thematically and formally. As such, it intervenes in scholarly discussions on the importance of labor and work to modernist artists. The contexts of colonial and racial history are foregrounded for their significance to the authors’ creative explorations of idleness, and in this way the dissertation also contributes to fields of comparative literature and postcolonial literary studies.The primary works addressed are Claude McKay’s novel Banjo (1929), Yi Sang’s short fictional narrative “Wings” (1936), and Samuel Beckett’s early novel Murphy (1938), as well as his later trilogy of Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953). The dissertation suggests that, like many twentieth-century modernist writers, McKay, Yi Sang, and Beckett took up work as an important concept for creative investigation. However, it argues that their interests in fact lie less with work itself than they do with idleness—a concept that capitalist ideology would define negatively in terms of the absence of productive labor but which these writers explore as a positive subjective state of being. As such, their writings powerfully critique the place of work in the modern world and challenge readers to question their own valuations of labor and idleness.