Other Becketts – serie

An original philosophical approach to one of the 20th century’s most important literary figuresCreative Involution: Bergson, Beckett Deleuze focuses on a force, on a philosophical trajectory that not only had a profound impact on critical thought of the 20th and now 21st centuries, but on cosmopolitan, contemporary culture more broadly and on artistic experiment and expression in particular. It explores how the work of Samuel Beckett intersects with such preoccupations of time as a "double headed monster," of memory and multiplicity, of being and becoming that continue in an involutionary turn through the work of Gilles Deleuze.Key Features:Deploys new critical approaches (e.g., a return to Bergson and Bergsonism) Addresses underexplored works in the Beckett canon Presents new critiques of representation and Beckett’s relationship to philosophy Attentive to critical thinking around affect theory and/in literature.S. E. Gontarski is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University where he edited the Journal of Beckett Studies from 1992-2008. He currently serves as Co-Editor for the Journal. Among his recent books are: The Beckett Critical Reader: Archives, Theories, and Translations (2012) and The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts (2014), both from Edinburgh University Press, and a second edition of On Beckett: Essays and Criticism from Anthem Press (2012).

Beckett's Co-authors takes a fresh look at Samuel Beckett and the business of authorship, especially his involvement in the complicated machinery of commercial theatre. Focusing particularly on Beckett's first professionally produced play, Waiting for Godot, and its premieres in the US, UK and the Republic of Ireland, this book examines extra-authorial interventions into the creative process and how such interventions challenges the autonomy of the author and his artwork. Calling the result of these early collaborations 'co-authorship', S. E. Gontarski delves into the hybrid genre of theatre where collective aesthetics tends to override and thus supersede individual creation, using the methodology of archival archaeology to uncover previously unpublished letters and unknown archival documents relating to three national premieres. These case studies nevertheless have implications far beyond a single theatrical work, placing a spotlight on the nature of authorship and the process of realising dramatic texts in a monetised culture.

Beckett’s Co-authors takes a fresh look at Samuel Beckett and the business of authorship, especially his involvement in the complicated machinery of commercial theatre. Focusing particularly on Beckett's first professionally produced play, Waiting for Godot, and its premieres in the US, UK and the Republic of Ireland, this book examines extra-authorial interventions into the creative process and how such interventions challenges the autonomy of the author and his artwork. Calling the result of these early collaborations ‘co-authorship’, S. E. Gontarski delves into the hybrid genre of theatre where collective aesthetics tends to override and thus supersede individual creation, using the methodology of archival archaeology to uncover previously unpublished letters and unknown archival documents relating to three national premieres. These case studies nevertheless have implications far beyond a single theatrical work, placing a spotlight on the nature of authorship and the process of realising dramatic texts in a monetised culture.

Taking Beckett’s mimes as a departure point, this book questions the value of his close attention to and choreography of the body for performance. It examines how Beckett’s encounters with the traditions of twentieth-century French mime impacted his theatrical imagination and directorial practices, exploring his uses of the miming body across a wide range of postwar works for theatre, film and television. Investigating the significances of movement, gesture and posture, the study emphasises what is embodied, kinetic and performed in Beckett’s work, keeping a steady gaze on the peculiarities of miming bodies to tease out and turn over their expressive capacities. Drawing on phenomenological philosophy, poststructural theory, performance analysis and historical literature, Jonathan McAllister argues that Beckett’s dramatic works provide a bodily commentary on being in mid- to late twentieth-century Europe: they constitute an embodied philosophical inquiry into the questions and anxieties for a generation experiencing a profound crisis of meaning.

Explores Samuel Beckett’s relation to painting and the visual imagination that informs his theatrical workBeckett was deeply engaged with the visual arts and individual painters, including Jack B. Yeats, Bram van Velde, and Avigdor Arikha. In this monograph, David Lloyd explores what Beckett saw in their paintings. He explains what visual resources Beckett found in these particular painters rather than in the surrealism of Masson or the abstraction of Kandinsky or Mondrian. The analysis of Beckett’s visual imagination is based on his criticism and on close analysis of the paintings he viewed. Lloyd shows how Beckett’s fascination with these painters illuminates the ‘painterly’ qualities of his theatre and the philosophical, political and aesthetic implications of Beckett’s highly visual dramatic work.Key FeaturesDiscusses Beckett’s relationship with three painters crucial to his life-long dialogue with the visual artsThe first book to examine the paintings that Beckett would have known and on which he based his critical remarksAccounts for the increasing visuality of Beckett’s theatre in relation to his evolving appreciation of painting and the formal questions posed by that mediumExplores Beckett’s anticipation of European phenomenology and psychoanalysis in relation to Heidegger and Lacan

Provides a sustained comparative reading of the relation between Beckett and Blanchot through its novel conception of the language and phenomenon of terrorSamuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature addresses the relevance of terror to understanding the violence, the suffering, and the pain experienced by the narrative voices of Beckett’s major post-1945 works in prose: The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing, How It Is, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho. Through a sustained dialogue with the theoretical work of Maurice Blanchot, it accomplishes a systematic interrogation of what happens in the space of literature when writing, and first of all Beckett’s, encounters the language of terror, thereby giving new significance – ethical, ontological, and political – to what speaks in Beckett’s texts.　 　Key FeaturesArticulates a novel conceptual framework through the language of terror for reading Beckett’s major post-1945 works in prose, all the while engaging with key thinkers in the discourse of contemporary critical theory like Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, and Alain BadiouProvides for the first time a thorough articulation of the significance of terror to Blanchot’s understanding not only of what literature is as literature, but also of the literary history of modernity that Blanchot explicitly traces from the Marquis de Sade to Samuel BeckettAffords literary studies (and Beckett and Blanchot studies specifically) a distinctive and timely voice in the veritable "terror industry" of scholarly research that has proliferated in the twenty-first century against the politico-historical backdrop of the War on Terror

A reading of the philosophical idea of world as it relates to the posthuman subject in Beckett’s short proseJonathan Boulter offers the reader a way of understanding Beckett’s presentation of the human, more precisely, posthuman, subject in his short prose. These texts are notoriously difficult yet utterly compelling. This compelling difficulty arises from Beckett’s radical dismantling of the idea of the human. His short texts offer instead an image of a being who may be posthumous, or ultimately beyond categories of life and death. And yet, despite this dismantling, the narrators of these texts still find themselves placed within material, recognisable, spaces. This book explores what the idea of ‘world’ can mean to a subject who appears to have moved into a material, even ecological, space that is beyond categories of life and death, being and world.Key Features:Provides a philosophical reading of Samuel BeckettRethinks Beckett in relation to the posthumanContributes to a relatively ignored aspect of Samuel Beckett's writing, the short prose

A reading of the philosophical idea of world as it relates to the posthuman subject in Beckett’s short proseJonathan Boulter offers the reader a way of understanding Beckett’s presentation of the human, more precisely, posthuman, subject in his short prose. These texts are notoriously difficult yet utterly compelling. This compelling difficulty arises from Beckett’s radical dismantling of the idea of the human. His short texts offer instead an image of a being who may be posthumous, or ultimately beyond categories of life and death. And yet, despite this dismantling, the narrators of these texts still find themselves placed within material, recognisable, spaces. This book explores what the idea of ‘world’ can mean to a subject who appears to have moved into a material, even ecological, space that is beyond categories of life and death, being and world.Key Features:Provides a philosophical reading of Samuel BeckettRethinks Beckett in relation to the posthumanContributes to a relatively ignored aspect of Samuel Beckett's writing, the short prose

Explores Samuel Beckett’s relation to painting and the visual imagination that informs his theatrical workBeckett was deeply engaged with the visual arts and individual painters, including Jack B. Yeats, Bram van Velde, and Avigdor Arikha. In this monograph, David Lloyd explores what Beckett saw in their paintings. He explains what visual resources Beckett found in these particular painters rather than in the surrealism of Masson or the abstraction of Kandinsky or Mondrian. The analysis of Beckett’s visual imagination is based on his criticism and on close analysis of the paintings he viewed. Lloyd shows how Beckett’s fascination with these painters illuminates the ‘painterly’ qualities of his theatre and the philosophical, political and aesthetic implications of Beckett’s highly visual dramatic work.Key FeaturesDiscusses Beckett’s relationship with three painters crucial to his life-long dialogue with the visual artsThe first book to examine the paintings that Beckett would have known and on which he based his critical remarksAccounts for the increasing visuality of Beckett’s theatre in relation to his evolving appreciation of painting and the formal questions posed by that mediumExplores Beckett’s anticipation of European phenomenology and psychoanalysis in relation to Heidegger and Lacan

The first sustained exegesis of a neglected masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, Samuel Beckett’s How It IsThis book maps out the novel’s complex network of intertexts, sources and echoes, interprets its highly experimental writing and explains the work’s great significance for twentieth-century literature. It offers a clear pathway into this remarkable bilingual novel, identifying Beckett’s use of previously unknown sources in the history of Western philosophy, from the ancient and modern periods, and challenging critical orthodoxies. Through careful archival scholarship and attention to the dynamics of self-translation, the book traces Beckett’s transformation of his narrator’s ‘ancient voice’, his intellectual heritage, into a mode of aesthetic representation that offers the means to think beyond intractable paradoxes of philosophy. This shift in the work’s relation to tradition marks a hiatus in literary modernism, a watershed moment whose deep and enduring significance may now be appreciated.Key FeaturesOffers the first comprehensive treatment of Beckett’s most poorly understood novel, identifying the breadth of its philosophical and literary sourcesMakes extensive use of manuscript evidence and newly accessible notes from Beckett’s reading in philosophyGuides the reader through Beckett’s philosophical and theological sources, highlighting his innovative and original dialectics between the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, the Ancient Stoics, the early Church Fathers and desert mystics, seventeenth-century mystics and Rationalists

The first sustained exegesis of a neglected masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, Samuel Beckett’s How It IsThis book maps out the novel’s complex network of intertexts, sources and echoes, interprets its highly experimental writing and explains the work’s great significance for twentieth-century literature. It offers a clear pathway into this remarkable bilingual novel, identifying Beckett’s use of previously unknown sources in the history of Western philosophy, from the ancient and modern periods, and challenging critical orthodoxies. Through careful archival scholarship and attention to the dynamics of self-translation, the book traces Beckett’s transformation of his narrator’s ‘ancient voice’, his intellectual heritage, into a mode of aesthetic representation that offers the means to think beyond intractable paradoxes of philosophy. This shift in the work’s relation to tradition marks a hiatus in literary modernism, a watershed moment whose deep and enduring significance may now be appreciated.Key FeaturesOffers the first comprehensive treatment of Beckett’s most poorly understood novel, identifying the breadth of its philosophical and literary sourcesMakes extensive use of manuscript evidence and newly accessible notes from Beckett’s reading in philosophyGuides the reader through Beckett’s philosophical and theological sources, highlighting his innovative and original dialectics between the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, the Ancient Stoics, the early Church Fathers and desert mystics, seventeenth-century mystics and Rationalists

Provides a sustained comparative reading of the relation between Beckett and Blanchot through its novel conception of the language and phenomenon of terrorSamuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature addresses the relevance of terror to understanding the violence, the suffering, and the pain experienced by the narrative voices of Beckett’s major post-1945 works in prose: The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing, How It Is, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho. Through a sustained dialogue with the theoretical work of Maurice Blanchot, it accomplishes a systematic interrogation of what happens in the space of literature when writing, and first of all Beckett’s, encounters the language of terror, thereby giving new significance – ethical, ontological, and political – to what speaks in Beckett’s texts.　 　Key FeaturesArticulates a novel conceptual framework through the language of terror for reading Beckett’s major post-1945 works in prose, all the while engaging with key thinkers in the discourse of contemporary critical theory like Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, and Alain BadiouProvides for the first time a thorough articulation of the significance of terror to Blanchot’s understanding not only of what literature is as literature, but also of the literary history of modernity that Blanchot explicitly traces from the Marquis de Sade to Samuel BeckettAffords literary studies (and Beckett and Blanchot studies specifically) a distinctive and timely voice in the veritable "terror industry" of scholarly research that has proliferated in the twenty-first century against the politico-historical backdrop of the War on Terror

An original philosophical approach to one of the 20th century’s most important literary figuresCreative Involution: Bergson, Beckett Deleuze focuses on a force, on a philosophical trajectory that not only had a profound impact on critical thought of the 20th and now 21st centuries, but on cosmopolitan, contemporary culture more broadly and on artistic experiment and expression in particular. It explores how the work of Samuel Beckett intersects with such preoccupations of time as a "double headed monster," of memory and multiplicity, of being and becoming that continue in an involutionary turn through the work of Gilles Deleuze.Key Features:Deploys new critical approaches (e.g., a return to Bergson and Bergsonism) Addresses underexplored works in the Beckett canon Presents new critiques of representation and Beckett’s relationship to philosophy Attentive to critical thinking around affect theory and/in literature.S. E. Gontarski is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University where he edited the Journal of Beckett Studies from 1992-2008. He currently serves as Co-Editor for the Journal. Among his recent books are: The Beckett Critical Reader: Archives, Theories, and Translations (2012) and The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts (2014), both from Edinburgh University Press, and a second edition of On Beckett: Essays and Criticism from Anthem Press (2012).

This book argues that the abject, decrepit body in Beckett does not signal the impossibility of agency but demands its reconceptualisation. Analysing the representation of the body in relation to the environment in Beckett's work, the author interrogates the power to do and act. Separating dynamic interaction from willed intention, Amanda Dennis shows how Beckett's oeuvre refashions subjectivity in dialogue with a disintegrating environment. The book provides a phenomenological reading of Beckett to argue that sensation and embodiment support our interactions with our material world, enabling possibilities for embodied agency in collaboration with our physical and linguistic surroundings.

Reveals how the body in Beckett, embedded in its material environment, exhibits embodied agencyAccents the importance of the body in Beckett and provides a new reading of the body in his postwar writing and experimental prose of the 60's and 80'sThe first study of Beckett and Merleau-Ponty as thinkers of space, this book asks how the body's relation to its surroundings both limits and enables agencyShows how Beckett and Merleau-Ponty inform contemporary debates about post-humanism, ecology and the body's relation to its material environmentExamines Beckett's ambivalent critique of humanist agency (as will) and draws on phenomenology to reveal in Beckett a version of agency that is more robust than poststructuralist or deconstructionist modelsThis book argues that the abject, decrepit body in Beckett does not signal the impossibility of agency but demands its reconceptualisation. Analysing the representation of the body in relation to the environment in Beckett's work, the author interrogates the power to do and act. Separating dynamic interaction from willed intention, Amanda Dennis shows how Beckett's oeuvre refashions subjectivity in dialogue with a disintegrating environment. The book provides a phenomenological reading of Beckett to argue that sensation and embodiment support our interactions with our material world, enabling possibilities for embodied agency in collaboration with our physical and linguistic surroundings.

Humility and humiliation have an awkward, often unacknowledged intimacy. Humility may be a queenly, cardinal or monkish virtue, while humiliation points to an affective state at the extreme end of shame. Yet a shared etymology links the words to lowliness and, further down, to the earth. As this study suggests, like the terms in question, T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett share an imperfect likeness. Between them is a common interest in states of abjection, shame and suffering – and possible responses to such states. Tracing the relation between negative affect, ethics, and aesthetics, Eliot and Beckett’s Low Modernism demonstrates how these two major modernists recuperate the affinity between humility and humiliation - concepts whose definitions have largely been determined by philosophy and theology.