Speech-Gesture Complex

Anthony Paraskeva is Senior Lecturer in English at Roehampton University. He is currently completing his second monograph, Samuel Beckett and Cinema.

The book combines an eloquent, robust style with ground-breaking argument and close pragmatic readings, placing modernist texts within European avant-garde contexts and experimental thinking about the body, triangulating theatre, cinema and writing. The gesture-complex idea is wonderfully original, woven into a superb texture by Paraskeva’s open-minded, rich sense of period and modernist multimedia event.

• Acknowledgements; Introduction; Kafka’s Amerika: The Aesthetics and Politics of Incompletion; Unstable categories: Naturalist and Modernist Performance Style; Performative Absence and Mechanical Reproduction; Theatre, Cinema and the Universal Language of Gesture; 1. James Joyce; ‘our sad want of signs’: Imperceptible Gestures in Ibsen and Joyce; Paralysis and Spectatorship: Henry James, Eleanora Duse, Yeats and Dubliners; Slips of the Hand in Exiles; ‘In the beginning was the gest’: ‘Circe’, Early Cinema and the ‘Art of Gestures’; 2. Wyndham Lewis; The Clown and the Über-Marionette in Enemy of the Stars; The Childermass: Lewis Vs Chaplin in the Afterlife; The Politics of Gesture: The Bailiff, Hitler and the Society of the Spectacle; 3. The Transition to Sound; Nabokov, Lewis and Garbo; Late Modernism and the Resistance to Sound; 4. Samuel Beckett; Hand-writing in Nacht und Träume; The Politics of Depersonalisation in Catastrophe; Bibliography.