Nearly every piece of Beckett criticism uses "Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit," yet many early assumptions about the work remain unexplored and unchallenged. "Beckett in (t)Transition" suggests new interpretive possibilities of Beckett’s work at the same time that it interrogates a number of critical trends that have formed within Beckettian criticism. With this
essay Beckett challenges the modernist aesthetic agenda developed by Eugene Jolas in transition magazine. In addition, the work reflects the dialogical approach to criticism developed by Georges Duthuit in the resurrected Transition 49, and makes a pointed response to Andre du Bouchet’s art-critical essay “Three Exhibitions” which precedes the dialogues immediately in that magazine. At the same time, Beckett’s use of the dialogue format undermines traditional discursive criticism, makes direct reference to Bishop Berkeley’s writings on phenomenalism, and provides a subversive tool by which Beckett can escape the aporia of expressing the impossibility of expression. He accomplishes this through highly oblique references to a number of artists, critics, and philosophers who claim to have negotiated the "void" between the subject and object. Ultimately, this late-modernist work uses modernist techniques to uncouple fundamental epistemological assumptions of modernism at the same time that it heralds Beckett's transition to postmodern practice.
