Anna McMullan - Böcker

This book, first published in 1993, is the first full-length analysis of Samuel Beckett’s later drama in the context of contemporary critical and performance theory. It employs a close, textual examination of the later plays as a springboard for exploring ideas around authority, gender and the ideology of performance. Recent work in the world of critical theory has suggested new ways of looking at performance practice. McMullan argues that, while contemporary theory can deepen our understanding of Beckett’s dramatic practice, his drama places performance in the context of a metaphysical history and a metatheatrical tradition, thereby confronting and provoking some of the central debates in performance studies’ engagement with critical theory.

This book, first published in 1993, is the first full-length analysis of Samuel Beckett’s later drama in the context of contemporary critical and performance theory. It employs a close, textual examination of the later plays as a springboard for exploring ideas around authority, gender and the ideology of performance. Recent work in the world of critical theory has suggested new ways of looking at performance practice. McMullan argues that, while contemporary theory can deepen our understanding of Beckett’s dramatic practice, his drama places performance in the context of a metaphysical history and a metatheatrical tradition, thereby confronting and provoking some of the central debates in performance studies’ engagement with critical theory.

The representation and experience of embodiment is a central preoccupation of Samuel Beckett’s drama, one that he explored through diverse media. McMullan investigates the full range of Beckett’s dramatic canon for stage, radio, television and film, including early drama, mimes and unpublished fragments. She examines how Beckett’s drama composes and recomposes the body in each medium, and provokes ways of perceiving, conceiving and experiencing embodiment that address wider preoccupations with corporeality, technology and systems of power. McMullan argues that the body in Beckett’s drama reveals a radical vulnerability of the flesh, questioning corporeal norms based on perfectible, autonomous or invulnerable bodies, but is also the site of a continual reworking of the self, and of the boundaries between self and other. Beckett’s re-imagining of the body presents embodiment as a collaborative performance between past and present, flesh and imagination, self and other, including the spectator / listener.

The representation and experience of embodiment is a central preoccupation of Samuel Beckett’s drama, one that he explored through diverse media. McMullan investigates the full range of Beckett’s dramatic canon for stage, radio, television and film, including early drama, mimes and unpublished fragments. She examines how Beckett’s drama composes and recomposes the body in each medium, and provokes ways of perceiving, conceiving and experiencing embodiment that address wider preoccupations with corporeality, technology and systems of power. McMullan argues that the body in Beckett’s drama reveals a radical vulnerability of the flesh, questioning corporeal norms based on perfectible, autonomous or invulnerable bodies, but is also the site of a continual reworking of the self, and of the boundaries between self and other. Beckett’s re-imagining of the body presents embodiment as a collaborative performance between past and present, flesh and imagination, self and other, including the spectator / listener.

This Element draws on the concept of ecosystems to investigate selected Beckett works across different media which present worlds where the human does not occupy a privileged place in the order of creation: rather Beckett's human figures are trapped in a regulated system in which they have little agency. Readers, listeners or viewers are complicit in the operation of techniques of observation inherent to the system, but also reminded of the vulnerability of those subjected to it. Beckett's work offers new paradigms and practices which reposition the human in relation to space, time and species.

Despite the steady rise in adaptations of Samuel Beckett’s work across the world following the author’s death in 1989, Beckett’s afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to this creative phenomenon. The collection employs interrelated concepts of adaptation, remediation and appropriation to reflect on Beckett’s own evolving approach to crossing genre boundaries and to analyse the ways in which contemporary artists across different media and diverse cultural contexts – including the UK, Europe, the USA and Latin America – continue to engage with Beckett. The book offers fresh insights into how his work has kept inspiring both practitioners and audiences in the twenty-first century, operating through methodologies and approaches that aim to facilitate and establish the study of modern-day adaptations, not just of Beckett but other (multimedia) authors as well.