Download or read book Obscure Locks Simple Keys written by Chris Ackerley and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-07 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Obscure Locks offers a detailed annotation of Samuel Beckett's most enigmatic novel, Watt. It provides a page by page account of the demented details (literary, philosophical, theological, biographical and other) that went into the making of this encyclop
Download or read book Obscure Locks Simple Keys written by Chris Ackerley and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Echo s Bones written by Samuel Beckett and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2014-07-02 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1933, Chatto & Windus agreed to publish Samuel Beckett's More Pricks Than Kicks, a collection of ten interrelated stories—his first published work of fiction. At his editor's request, Beckett penned an additional story, "Echo's Bones", to serve as the final piece. However, he’d already killed off several of the characters—including the protagonist, Belacqua—throughout the book, and had to resurrect them from the dead. The story was politely rejected by his editor, as it was considered too imaginatively playful, too allusive, and too undisciplined—qualities now recognized as quintessentially Beckett. As a result, "Echo's Bones" (not to be confused with the poem and collection of poems of the same title) remained unpublished—until now, nearly eight decades later. This little-known text is introduced by the preeminent Beckett scholar, Dr. Mark Nixon, who situates the work in terms of its biographical context and textual references, examining how it is a vital link in the evolution of Beckett's early work. Beckett confessed that he included "all I knew" in the story. It harnesses an immense range of subjects: science, philosophy, religion, literature; combining fairy tales, gothic dreams, and classical myth. This posthumous publication marks the unexpected and highly exciting return of a literary legend.
Download or read book Beckett s Art of Mismaking written by Leland de la Durantaye and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-04 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers have long responded to Samuel Beckett’s novels and plays with wonder or bafflement. They portray blind, lame, maimed creatures cracking whips and wielding can openers who are funny when they should be chilling, cruel when they should be tender, warm when most wounded. His works seem less to conclude than to stop dead. And so readers quite naturally ask: what might all this be meant to mean? In a lively and enlivening study of a singular creative nature, Leland de la Durantaye helps us better understand Beckett’s strangeness and the notorious difficulties it presents. He argues that Beckett’s lifelong campaign was to mismake on purpose—not to denigrate himself, or his audience, nor even to reconnect with the child or the savage within, but because he believed that such mismaking is in the interest of art and will shape its future. Whether called “creative willed mismaking,” “logoclasm,” or “word-storming in the name of beauty,” Beckett meant by these terms an art that attacks language and reason, unity and continuity, art and life, with wit and venom. Beckett’s Art of Mismaking explains Beckett’s views on language, the relation between work and world, and the interactions between stage and page, as well as the motives guiding his sixty-year-long career—his strange decision to adopt French as his literary language, swerve from the complex novels to the minimalist plays, determination to “fail better,” and principled refusal to follow any easy path to originality.
Download or read book Beckett and Phenomenology written by Ulrika Maude and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-10-20 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Existentialism and poststructuralism have provided the two main theoretical approaches to Samuel Beckett's work. These influential philosophical movements, however, owe a great debt to the phenomenological tradition. This volume, with contributions by major international scholars, examines the phenomenal in Beckett's literary worlds, comparing and contrasting his writing with key figures including Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It advances an analysis of hitherto unexplored phenomenological themes, such as nausea, immaturity and sleep, in Beckett's work. Through an exploration of specific thinkers and Beckett's own artistic method, it offers the first sustained and comprehensive account of Beckettian phenomenology.
Download or read book French XX Bibliography Issue 65 written by Sheri K. Dion and published by Susquehanna University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Beckett and Ethics written by Russell Smith and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-10-20 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At first glance, Samuel Beckett's writing-where scenes of violence and cruelty often provide the occasion for an unremittingly bleak comedy-would seem to offer the reader few examples of ethical conduct. However, following the recent "ethical turn" in critical theory, there has been growing interest in the ethicality of Beckett's work. Following Alain Badiou's highly influential claim for Beckett as essentially an ethical thinker, it is time to ask: What is the relation between Beckett's work and the ethical? Is Beckett's work profoundly ethical in its implications, as both humanist and deconstructionist readings have insisted in their different ways? Or does Beckett's work in some way call into question the entire notion of the ethical? This provocative collection of essays seeks to map out this emerging debate in Beckett criticism. It will be a landmark contribution to an exciting new field, not only in Beckett Studies, but in literary studies and critical theory more broadly.
Download or read book The Proof Stage written by Stephen Abbott and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-11 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How playwrights from Alfred Jarry and Samuel Beckett to Tom Stoppard and Simon McBurney brought the power of abstract mathematics to the human stage The discovery of alternate geometries, paradoxes of the infinite, incompleteness, and chaos theory revealed that, despite its reputation for certainty, mathematical truth is not immutable, perfect, or even perfectible. Beginning in the last century, a handful of adventurous playwrights took inspiration from the fractures of modern mathematics to expand their own artistic boundaries. Originating in the early avant-garde, mathematics-infused theater reached a popular apex in Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia. In The Proof Stage, mathematician Stephen Abbott explores this unlikely collaboration of theater and mathematics. He probes the impact of mathematics on such influential writers as Alfred Jarry, Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, and Stoppard, and delves into the life and mathematics of Alan Turing as they are rendered onstage. The result is an unexpected story about the mutually illuminating relationship between proofs and plays—from Euclid and Euripides to Gödel and Godot. Theater is uniquely poised to discover the soulful, human truths embedded in the austere theorems of mathematics, but this is a difficult feat. It took Stoppard twenty-five years of experimenting with the creative possibilities of mathematics before he succeeded in making fractal geometry and chaos theory integral to Arcadia’s emotional arc. In addition to charting Stoppard’s journey, Abbott examines the post-Arcadia wave of ambitious works by Michael Frayn, David Auburn, Simon McBurney, Snoo Wilson, John Mighton, and others. Collectively, these gifted playwrights transform the great philosophical upheavals of mathematics into profound and sometimes poignant revelations about the human journey.
Download or read book Beckett and Nothing written by Daniela Caselli and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-09 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Beckett and nothing invites its readership to understand the complex ways in which the Beckett canon both suggests and resists turning nothing into something by looking at specific, sometimes almost invisible ways in which ‘little nothings’ pervade the Beckett canon. The volume has two main functions: on the one hand, it looks at ‘nothing’ not only as a content but also a set of rhetorical strategies to reconsider afresh classic Beckett problems such as Irishness, silence, value, marginality, politics and the relationships between modernism and postmodernism and absence and presence. On the other, it focuses on ‘nothing’ in order to assess how the Beckett oeuvre can help us rethink contemporary preoccupations with materialism, neurology, sculpture, music and television. The volume is a scholarly intervention in the fields of Beckett studies which offers its chapters as case studies to use in the classroom. It will prove of interest to advanced students and scholars in English, French, Comparative Literature, Drama, Visual Studies, Philosophy, Music, Cinema and TV studies.
Download or read book Beckett s Dedalus written by Peter John Murphy and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paying close attention to the extensive network of allusions Beckett derived from Joyce's writing, P.J. Murphy reveals how Beckett consistently echoed and engaged in dialogue with Joyce's works.
Download or read book Samuel Beckett in Confinement written by James Little and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confinement appears repeatedly in Samuel Beckett's oeuvre – from the asylums central to Murphy and Watt to the images of confinement that shape plays such as Waiting for Godot and Endgame. Drawing on spatial theory and new archival research, Beckett in Confinement explores these recurring concepts of closed space to cast new light on the ethical and political dimensions of Beckett's work. Covering the full range of Beckett's writing career, including two plays he completed for prisoners, Catastrophe and the unpublished 'Mongrel Mime', the book shows how this engagement with the ethics of representing prisons and asylums stands at the heart of Beckett's poetics. "James Little's Beckett in Confinement offers a brilliant analysis of the politics behind Beckett's production of closed space, both as a writer and as a director. It carefully examines the move from writing about closed space to creating an art of confinement. To argue that Beckett's use of confined space is central to the political dynamics of his works, James Little also superbly employs genetic criticism to open up the confined space of the published text and bring highly relevant draft materials back into the critical conversation." Dirk Van Hulle, Professor of Bibliography and Modern Book History, University of Oxford, UK "The many characters Beckett invented share one characteristic: they are all imprisoned or trapped in some way, no matter where they are. Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space draws on untapped riches from Beckett's correspondence and the archives to reconsider the obsession with entrapment, coercion and detention central to Beckett's varied oeuvre. In this exciting and illuminating analysis, James Little offers a fresh and original reading of the work's ethical and political dimensions, and shows us why we need to stop thinking about confinement as a metaphysical metaphor." Emilie Morin, Professor of Modern Literature, University of York, UK "Little breaks new ground in this expansive investigation to explore how confinement is a central component of Beckett's political aesthetics ... The reader is guided by a crisp and easy style of writing as Little demonstrates a command of sources which are broad in scope, but negotiated to form a compelling and impactful study." Journal of Beckett Studies
Download or read book Beckett and Death written by Steven Barfield and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-10-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death is indisputably central to Beckett's writing and reception. This collection of research considers a number of Beckett's poems, novels, plays and short stories through considerations of mortality and death. Chapters explore the theme of deathliness in relation to Beckett's work as a whole, through three main approaches. The first of these situates Beckett's thinking about death in his own writing and reading processes, particularly with respect to manuscript drafts and letters. The second on the death of the subject in Beckett links dominant 'poststructural' readings of Beckett's writing to the textual challenge exemplified by the The Unnamable. A final approach explores psychology and death, with emphasis on deathly states like catatonia and Cotard's Syndrome that recur in Beckett's work. Beckett and Death offers a range of cutting-edge approaches to the trope of mortality, and a unique insight into the relationship of this theme to all aspects of Beckett's literature.
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 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 The International Reception of Samuel Beckett written by Mark Nixon and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last decade, Samuel Beckett's popularity has rocketed around the world and he is increasingly recognised as one of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century but there has been very little scholarly work on Beckett's reception outside Europe. This comprehensive volume brings together essays from leading critics on Beckett's international critical reception. Due to Beckett's linguistic and artistic abilities, he was intimately involved in the translation and production of his writings in German, French, English and Spanish; and consequently countries using these languages have sophisticated critical traditions. However, many other countries have adopted Beckett as their own, from places where he lived for lengthy periods of his life (England, France, Ireland and Germany), to those finding directly applicable political messages in his work (such as ex-Soviet states including the Czech Republic and Romania), and those countries whose national literary traditions bear heavily upon his work (e.g. Norway and Italy). This fascinating volume reveals Beckett's evolving critical reception from contemporary reviews to the present.
Download or read book Samuel Beckett and the Second World War written by William Davies and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the Second World War, Samuel Beckett wrote some of the most significant literary works of the 20th century. This is the first full-length historical study to examine the far-reaching impact of the war on Beckett's creative and intellectual sensibilities. Drawing on a substantial body of archival material, including letters, manuscripts, diaries and interviews, as well as a wealth of historical sources, this book explores Beckett's writing in a range of political contexts, from the racist dogma of Nazism and aggressive traditionalism of the Vichy regime to Irish neutrality censorship and the politics of recovery in the French Fourth Republic. Along the way, Samuel Beckett and the Second World War casts new light on Beckett's political commitments and his concepts of history as they were formed during Europe's darkest hour.
Download or read book Samuel Beckett and the State of Ireland written by Alan Graham and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-07-27 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflecting the rich critical debate at the ‘Beckett and the State of Ireland’ conferences held in Dublin between 2011 and 2013, this volume brings together a selection of essays which explore and respond to the Irish concerns which echo in the fiction, drama, and poetry of Samuel Beckett. From the portrayals of the haunting landscape of South County Dublin in Beckett’s work to its interrogation of the political and social pieties of the infant nation state in which the author came to maturity, Beckett and the ‘State’ of Ireland uncovers the enduring presence of Ireland in one of the most influential bodies of writing in modern literature. Examining the politics of cultural identity, sexuality in the post-independence era, representations of disability in Beckett’s fiction and drama, Ireland’s culture of incarceration, the role of eugenics in the Irish cultural imagination, and the themes of exile and displacement in Beckett’s writing, amongst other concerns, Beckett and the ‘State’ of Ireland enriches understandings of the social, cultural, and political dimensions of Beckett’s work and introduces new and challenging perspectives to the study of Irish literature and culture.
