Paul Andrew Woolridge

This article demonstrates how Samuel Beckett's Endgame fleshes out the implausible entailments of a world premised on the emotivist understanding of the self-on a noncognitivist conception of metaethical anti-realism, which is precisely the moral theory of meaning that Alasdair MacIntyre sets out to dismantle in After Virtue. I delineate an analogy between MacIntyre's critique of post-Enlightenment conceptions of obligation and Beckett's staging of moral incoherence and interpersonal manipulation parodied throughout Endgame.

Scrutiny (1932-1953) was one of the most important critical reviews of the last century. Its editors and contributors included F. R. Leavis, Q. D. Leavis, Denys Thompson, L. C. Knights, D. W. Harding, W. H. Mellers, H. A. Mason, among others. In recasting Scrutiny’s critique of mass culture by way of Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981), I hope to show that the Scrutiny project not only dramatizes the conflicts internal to what MacIntyre calls emotivist culture, but provides a new way of looking at the group’s relation to the culture industry, its purported elitism, and its deep ties with a communitarian rather than socialist politics.