Download or read book Beckett Philosophy written by Matthew Feldman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-01 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays, most of which return to or renew something of an empirical or archival approach to the issues, represents the most comprehensive analysis of Beckett's relationship to philosophy in print, how philosophical issues, conundrums, and themes play out amid narrative intricacies. The volume is thus both an astonishingly comprehensive overview and a series of detailed readings of the intersection between philosophical texts and Samuel Beckett's oeuvre, offered by a plurality of voices and bookended by an historical introduction and a thematic conclusion.?S. E. Gontarski, Journal of Beckett StudiesThis is an important contribution to ongoing attempts to understand the relationship of Beckett's work to philosophy. It breaks some new ground, and helps us to consider not only how Beckett made use of philosophy but how his own thought might be understood philosophical.?Anthony Uhlmann, University of Western Sydney
Download or read book Philosophy of Samuel Beckett written by John Calder and published by Alma Books. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ncreasingly Samuel Beckett's writing is seen as the culmination of the great literature of the twentieth century - succeeding the work of Proust, Joyce and Kafka. Beckett is a writer whose relevance to his time and use of poetic imagery can be compared to Shakespeare's in the late Renaissance. John Calder has examined the work of Beckett principally for what it has to say about our time in terms of philosophy, theology and ethics, and he points to aspects of his subject's thinking that others have ignored or preferred not to see. Samuel Beckett's acute mind pulled apart with courage and much humour the basic assumptions and beliefs by which most people live. His satire can be biting and his wit devastating. He found no escape from human tragedy in the comforts we build to shield ourselves from reality - even in art, which for most intellectuals has replaced religion. However, he did develop a moral message - one which is in direct contradiction to the values of ambition, success, acquisition and security which is normally held up for admiration, and he looks at the greed, God-worship, and cruelty to others which we increasingly take for granted, in a way that is both unconventional and revolutionary.If this study shocks many readers it is because the honesty, the integrity and the depth of Beckett's thinking - expressed through his novels, plays and poetry, but also through his other writings and correspondence - is itself shocking, to conventional thinking. Yet what he has to say is also comforting. He offers a different ethic and prescription for living - a message based on stoic courage, compassion and an ability to understand and forgive.
Download or read book Samuel Beckett s Philosophy Notes written by Steven Matthews and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-25 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Irish writer and Nobel Prize winner, Samuel Beckett, assembled for himself a history of western philosophy during the 1930s, just at the point at which his first novel, Murphy, was coming together. The 'Philosophy Notes', together with related notes taken at that time about St. Augustine, thereafter provided Beckett with a store of knowledge, but also with phrases and images, which he took up in the major work that won him international and enduring fame, from the dramas Waiting for Godot and Endgame, through to the late prose works Worstward Ho and Stirrings Still. This edition presents, for the first time, Beckett's full 'Philosophy Notes', which constitute his most extensive unpublished text. The Notes display Beckett's own interests and emphases within the history of western philosophy, from the pre-Socratic Greeks onwards, together with more familiar figures in the study of his work, such as Descartes, Leibnitz, and Geulincx. Here we see Beckett's original thoughts on all of these figures for the first time. The Notes also, tellingly and often comically, display Beckett's impatience with many aspects of philosophy, such as its anthropological or anthropomorphic bias, or the idealism of the Enlightenment and Kant. The Edition contains an extensive Introduction, outlining the origin of Beckett's Notes, his major sources and approach to them, the historical context for his view of philosophy, and the significance of Beckett's 'Philosophy Notes' within his mature writings. The many footnotes then suggest ways in which particular aspects of the philosophy narrated here by Beckett suggest fresh insights into those later writings—the images, but also the creative impulses, behind some of his most famous texts. This Edition, further, raises larger questions about, and perspectives upon, the relation between philosophy and literature in the twentieth century and beyond.
Download or read book Philosophical Aesthetics and Samuel Beckett written by Andrea Oppo and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2008 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the role of Samuel Beckett in contemporary philosophical aesthetics, primarily through analysis of both his own essays and the various interpretations that philosophers (especially Adorno, Blanchot, Deleuze, and Badiou) have given to his works. The study centres around the fundamental question of the relationship between art and truth, where art, as a negative truth, comes to its complete exhaustion (as Deleuze terms it) by means of a series of 'endgames' that progressively involve philosophy, writing, language and every individual and minimal form of expression. The major thesis of the book is that, at the heart of Beckett's philosophical project, this 'aesthetics of truth' turns out to be nothing other than the real subject itself, within a contradictory and tragic relationship that ties the Self/Voice to the Object/Body. Yet a number of questions remain open. 'What' or 'who' lies behind this process? What is left of the endgame of art and subjectivity? Finally, what sustains and renders possible Beckett's paradoxical axiom of the 'impossibility to express' alongside the 'obligation to express'? By means of a thorough overview of the most recent criticism of Beckett, this book will try to answer these questions.
Download or read book Beckett and Philosophy written by R. Lane and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2001-12-17 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beckett and Philosophy examines and interrogates the relationships between Samuel Beckett's works and contemporary French and German thought. There are two wide-ranging overview chapters by Richard Begam (Beckett and Postfoundationalism) and Robert Eaglestone (Beckett via Literary and Philosophical Theories), and individual chapters on Beckett, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou, Merleau-Ponty, Adorno, Habermas, Heidegger and Nietzsche. The collection takes a fresh look as issues such as postmodern and poststructuralist thought in relation to Beckett studies, providing useful overview chapters and original essays.
Download or read book Abstract Machines written by Garin Dowd and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2007 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari" is an innovative approach to the relationship of the work of Samuel Beckett to philosophy. The study seeks to combine intertextual analysis and a 'schizoanalytic genealogy' derived from the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to explore a 'becoming-philosophy' of Beckett's literary writing. The author focuses on zones of encounter and confrontation - spaces and times of 'becoming' - between Beckett, selected philosophers and Deleuze and Guattari. In the retrospective glance occasioned by that part of Deleuze and Guattari's complex legacy which embraces their interest in the author, Beckett's writing in particular effectuates a threshold hesitation which can be seen directly to impact on their approach to the history of philosophy and on their contribution to its 'molecularization' in the name of experimentation. "Abstract Machines," with its arresting perspectives on a wide range of Beckett's work, will appeal to academics and postgraduate students interested in the philosophical echoes so evident in his writing. The extent of its recourse to philosophers aside from Deleuze and Guattari, including, notably, Alain Badiou, renders it a timely and provocative intervention in contemporary debates concerning the relationship of literature to philosophy, both within Beckett studies and beyond.
Download or read book Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image written by Anthony Uhlmann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-12-14 with total page 3 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beckett often made use of images from the visual arts and readapted them, staging them in his plays, or using them in his fiction. Anthony Uhlmann sets out to explain how an image differs from other terms, like 'metaphor' or 'representation', and, in the process, to analyse Beckett's use of images borrowed from philosophy and aesthetics. This study, first published in 2006, carefully examines Beckett's thoughts on the image in his literary works and his extensive notes to the philosopher Arnold Geulincx. Uhlmann considers how images might allow one kind of interaction between philosophy and literature, and how Beckett makes use of images which are borrowed from, or drawn into dialogue with, philosophical images from Geulincx, Berkeley, Bergson, and the ancient Stoics. Uhlmann's reading of Beckett's aesthetic and philosophical interests provides a revolutionary reading of the importance of the image in his work.
Download or read book Still Samuel Beckett s Quietism written by Wimbush Andy and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2020-06-18 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1930s, a young Samuel Beckett confessed to a friend that he had been living his life according to an ‘abject self-referring quietism’. Andy Wimbush argues that ‘quietism’—a philosophical and religious attitude of renunciation and will-lessness—is a key to understanding Beckett’s artistic vision and the development of his career as a fiction writer from his early novels Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Murphy to late short prose texts such as Stirrings Still and Company. Using Beckett’s published and archival material, Still: Samuel Beckett’s Quietism shows how Beckett distilled an understanding of quietism from the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, E.M. Cioran, Thomas à Kempis, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and André Gide, before turning it into an aesthetic that would liberate him from the powerful literary traditions of nineteenth-century realism and early twentieth-century high modernism. Quietism, argues Andy Wimbush, was for Beckett a lifelong preoccupation that shaped his perspectives on art, relationships, ethics, and even notions of salvation. But most of all it showed Beckett a way to renounce authorial power and write from a position of impotence, ignorance, and incoherence so as to produce a new kind of fiction that had, in Molloy’s words, the ‘tranquility of decomposition’.
Download or read book Samuel Beckett s How It Is written by Anthony Cordingley and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-07 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical guide to the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, organised around the philosophers and thinkers he draws on and critiques.
Download or read book The Empty Too written by Arthur Broomfield and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-26 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engaging and often controversial study of Beckett’s works argues that, for Beckett, pure language is reality. Taking its title from a sentence in Worstward Ho, this rigorous reading of Beckett’s key texts claims that what we perceive in the existential world can never be proved to exist, while language survives scrutiny, and will ‘go on’ to become the real, once it has been divested of its connection to the corporeal. This book draws on the major philosophers to support this thesis, but in so doing argues that Beckett’s thinking surpasses all of theirs, because Beckett’s art is his philosophy and his philosophy is his art. For Beckett, pure language is beyond the text, it is the unpresentable presence, Hamm’s ‘life to come’.
Download or read book Samuel Beckett s Philosophy Notes written by Samuel Beckett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Irish writer and Nobel Prize winner, Samuel Beckett, assembled for himself a history of western philosophy during the 1930s, just at the point at which his first novel, Murphy, was coming together. The 'Philosophy Notes', together with related notes taken at that time about St. Augustine, thereafter provided Beckett with a store of knowledge, but also with phrases and images, which he took up in the major work that won him international and enduring fame, from the dramas Waiting for Godot and Endgame, through to the late prose works Worstward Ho and Stirrings Still. This edition presents, for the first time, Beckett's full 'Philosophy Notes', which constitute his most extensive unpublished text. The Notes display Beckett's own interests and emphases within the history of western philosophy, from the pre-Socratic Greeks onwards, together with more familiar figures in the study of his work, such as Descartes, Leibnitz, and Geulincx. Here we see Beckett's original thoughts on all of these figures for the first time. The Notes also, tellingly and often comically, display Beckett's impatience with many aspects of philosophy, such as its anthropological or anthropomorphic bias, or the idealism of the Enlightenment and Kant. The Edition contains an extensive Introduction, outlining the origin of Beckett's Notes, his major sources and approach to them, the historical context for his view of philosophy, and the significance of Beckett's 'Philosophy Notes' within his mature writings. The many footnotes then suggest ways in which particular aspects of the philosophy narrated here by Beckett suggest fresh insights into those later writings--the images, but also the creative impulses, behind some of his most famous texts. This Edition, further, raises larger questions about, and perspectives upon, the relation between philosophy and literature in the twentieth century and beyond.
Download or read book Beckett and Poststructuralism written by Anthony Uhlmann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-09-02 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Beckett and Poststructuralism, Anthony Uhlmann offers a reading of Beckett in relation to French philosophy, particularly the work of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Levinas, and Derrida. Uhlmann offers a work of literary criticism that is also a piece of intellectual history, emphasizing how Beckett develops a kind of critical thinking which differs from yet is just as powerful as that of philosophers who, along with Beckett, found themselves faced with sets of ethical problems which were thrown into sharp relief in post-war France. Uhlmann explores the links between ethics and physical existence in Beckett, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, and between ethics and language in Beckett, Derrida and Levinas, showing how post-war French philosophy was powerfully affected by Beckett's work. Literature is not reduced to philosophy or vice versa; rather Uhlmann considers how they interrelate and overlap, informing and deforming one another, and how both encounter history.
Download or read book Silence in Modern Literature and Philosophy written by Thomas Gould and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-12 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the elusive centrality of silence in modern literature and philosophy, focusing on the writing and theory of Jean-Luc Nancy and Roland Barthes, the prose of Samuel Beckett, and the poetry of Wallace Stevens. It suggests that silence is best understood according to two categories: apophasis and reticence. Apophasis is associated with theology, and relates to a silence of ineffability and transcendence; reticence is associated with phenomenology, and relates to a silence of listenership and speechlessness. In a series of diverse though interrelated readings, the study examines figures of broken silence and silent voice in the prose of Samuel Beckett, the notion of shared silence in Jean-Luc Nancy and Roland Barthes, and ways in which the poetry of Wallace Stevens mounts lyrical negotiations with forms of unsayability and speechlessness.
Download or read book Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image written by Anthony Uhlmann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-12-14 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revolutionary reading of Beckett's aesthetic and philosophical interests.
Download or read book Beckett s Late Stage written by Rhys Tranter and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2018-02-28 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beckett’s Late Stage reexamines the Nobel laureate’s post-war prose and drama in the light of contemporary trauma theory. Through a series of sustained close-readings, the study demonstrates how the comings and goings of Beckett’s prose unsettles the Western philosophical tradition; it reveals how Beckett’s live theatrical productions are haunted by the rehearsal of traumatic repetition, and asks what his ghostly radio recordings might signal for twentieth-century modernity. Drawing from psychoanalytic and poststructuralist traditions, Beckett’s Late Stage explores how the traumatic symptom allows us to rethink the relationship between language, meaning, and identity after 1945.
Download or read book The Metaphysical Vision written by Ulrich Pothast and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2008 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Metaphysical Vision: Arthur Schopenhauer's Philosophy of Art and Life and Samuel Beckett's Own Way to Make Use of It expands upon the ideas and theories set forth in the author's Die eigentlich metaphysische Tätigkeit: Über Schopenhauers Ästhetik und ihre Anwendung durch Samuel Beckett, published (in German) in 1982 and hailed by Catharina Wulf in her book The Imperative of Narration (1997) as an «excellent study» and «the most thorough enquiry into Beckett and Schopenhauer.» In the last years of the twentieth century, new documents regarding Samuel Beckett's reading and thinking, especially important notebooks and letters, have become accessible to scholars. These documents show much more clearly than could ever be demonstrated previously that Beckett had a strong, lifelong interest in Schopenhauer's philosophy. There is no other philosopher to whom Beckett refers more often in his personal comments throughout the years of his writing up to his seventies; no other philosopher whose view of life and the world comes closer to the image of human existence we find in Samuel Beckett's literary work. The striking similarity in matters of world view and human life, and especially the evidence obtained from Beckett's previously unknown notebooks and letters, call for a close systematic study of the Beckett-Schopenhauer relationship. Due to its comprehensiveness and in-depth approach, The Metaphysical Vision is, and will be for many years to come, what its forerunner was for more than two decades: the most thorough enquiry into Beckett and Schopenhauer.
Download or read book Beckett Derrida and the Event of Literature written by Asja Szafraniec and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The late Jacques Derrida’s notion of literature is explored in this new study. Starting with Derrida’s self-professed inability to comment on the work of Samuel Beckett, whom Derrida nevertheless considered one of the most interesting and exemplary writers of our time, Asja Szafraniec argues that the shared feature of literary works as Derrida understands them is a double, juridical-economical gesture, and that one aspect of this notion (the juridical) is more hospitable to Beckett’s oeuvre than the other. She then discusses other contemporary philosophical approaches to Beckett, including those of Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, and Alain Badiou. The book offers an innovative analysis of Derrida’s approach to literature, as well as an overview of current philosophical approaches to contemporary literature, and a number of innovative readings of Beckett’s work.
