Images of Beckett combines John Haynes' unique repertoire of photographs of Beckett's dramatic opus alongside three newly written essays by Beckett's biographer and friend, James Knowlson. Haynes ...captures images of Beckett's work in progress and performance and includes hitherto unknown portraits of Beckett himself. Haynes was privileged to be present at the Royal Court Theatre, London, when Beckett directed his own plays. Amongst the 75 plates are compositions that include the leading interpreters of the plays. Knowlson's first essay combines a verbal portrait of Beckett with a personal memoir of the writer; the second considers the influence of paintings that Beckett loved or admired on his theatrical imagery; and the third offers a detailed, often first-hand, account of Beckett's work as a director of his own plays. The essays are the result of personal conversations with Beckett and attendance at rehearsals, and provide a privileged glimpse into the world of one of the theatre's most influential and enduring playwrights.
Beckett's Political Imagination charts unexplored territory: it investigates how Beckett's bilingual texts re-imagine political history, and documents the conflicts and controversies through which ...Beckett's political consciousness and affirmations were mediated. The book offers a startling account of Beckett's work, tracing the many political causes that framed his writing, commitments, collaborations and friendships, from the Scottsboro Boys to the Black Panthers, from Irish communism to Spanish republicanism to Algerian nationalism, and from campaigns against Irish and British censorship to anti-Apartheid and international human rights movements. Emilie Morin reveals a very different writer, whose career and work were shaped by a unique exposure to international politics, an unconventional perspective on political action and secretive political engagements. The book will benefit students, researchers and readers who want to think about literary history in different ways and are interested in Beckett's enduring appeal and influence.
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.
Samuel Becketts theatrical works maintain a prominent position within contemporary theatre. His plays provide a prodigious potential to study several forms of acting, staging, and dramaturgy, as ...well as language and translation, thereby setting a fertile ground to tackle the problematic issue of the relationship between theatre criticism and theatre-translation criticism. That is precisely what this study aims at by drawing attention to the fundamental characteristics of translated theatre.
Obscure Locks, Simple Keys is a comprehensive study of this most enigmatic of all of Samuel Beckett's texts. Chris Ackerley's approach, which has some similarities to genetic editing, is based on an ...extensive study of the manuscripts and different editions (including the French translation, overseen by Beckett himself) of the novel, and the long introduction covers the complex history of the book's composition and publication. The book includes a thematic Index and extensive Bibliography, as well as two appendices: one deals with 'Textual changes and errata in the major editions of Watt'; the other with the tangled question of 'The evolution of Watt'. Most of the work, however, concerns the detailed annotation of the text, and examines the range of literary, religious and philosophical matters that have informed and shaped the text. The primary aim of the volume is to offer a complete exposition of the novel's disconcerting difficulties, but another major objective, given the parlous state of previous editions, was to identify and correct the long history of textual error, with a view to the future publication of a better text.
Leland de la Durantaye helps us understand Beckett’s strangeness and notorious difficulty by arguing that Beckett’s lifelong campaign was to mismake on purpose—not to denigrate himself, or his ...audience, or reconnect with the child or savage within, but because he believed that such mismaking is in the interest of art and will shape its future.
Impotence and Making in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy is situated at the intersection of the aesthetic, socio-political and theoretical construction of being and not-being; it is about making the self, ...making others, and making words, set against being unable to make the self, others and words. Concentrating on Samuel Beckett's prose works, though also focusing on some of his dramatic works, the book aims to problematize the categories of 'impotence' and 'making' by showing Beckett's quasi-deconstructive treatment of them as seen through his narrators' images of being unable to make self, other creatures and words (impotence), along with his narrators' images of making self, other creatures and words (making). By demonstrating that his narrators, while being impotent, nevertheless gestate and produce new entities from their bodies in the same way as a mother does a child, the book aims to reveal how, for Beckett's narrators, creativity in its widest sense is envisaged.
The play’s juxtapositions of the loquacious Winnie with her taci-turn husband, of her frenzied upper limbs with her immured legs, and of her cheery attitude with slippages of despair are part and ...parcel of its dramatic world. When Dwan’s speech became a touch declamatory, one could feel that she was earnestly attempting to leave a vocal imprint on the world and elicit Willie’s attention and response. Reframing Winnie’s increasing submersion in the mound as a replacement of brimming life by all-consuming decay, it brought out the symbolic dimensions of Beckett’s play. “what difficulties here, for the mind,” says Winnie, “to have been always what I am—and so changed from what I was.”
Samuel Beckett and trauma Tanaka, Mariko Hori; Tajiri, Yoshiki; Tsushima, Michiko
2018., 20180706, 2018, 2018-07-06
eBook
Samuel Beckett and trauma is the first book that specifically addresses the question of trauma in Beckett, taking into account the recent rise of trauma studies in literature. Beckett is an author ...whose works are strongly related to the psychological and historical trauma of our age. His works not only explore the multifarious aspects of trauma but also radically challenge our conception of trauma itself by the unique syntax of language, aesthetics of fragmentation, bodily malfunctions and the creation of void. Instead of simply applying current trauma theories to Beckett, this book provides new perspectives that will expand and alter them by employing other theoretical frameworks in literature, theatre, art, philosophy and psychoanalysis. It will inspire anybody interested in literature and trauma, including specialists and students working on twentieth-century world literature, comparative studies, trauma studies and theatre /art.
