Beckett's Art of Absence

Beckett's Art of Absence PDF Author: Ciaran Ross
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780230575189
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Using the work of W.Bion and D.Winnicott, this book offers a psychoanalytic study of Beckett's aesthetics of absence. Focusing on the first prose trilogy and Waiting for Godot, it offers a critical challenge to accepted viewpoints of Beckett's negative status, not only within psychoanalytic literary criticism, but within Beckett criticism at large.

Beckett's Art of Absence

Beckett's Art of Absence PDF Author: Ciaran Ross
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780230575189
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Using the work of W.Bion and D.Winnicott, this book offers a psychoanalytic study of Beckett's aesthetics of absence. Focusing on the first prose trilogy and Waiting for Godot, it offers a critical challenge to accepted viewpoints of Beckett's negative status, not only within psychoanalytic literary criticism, but within Beckett criticism at large.

Beckett, Joyce and the Art of the Negative

Beckett, Joyce and the Art of the Negative PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 940120120X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
This collection presents articles that examine Joyce and Beckett’s mutual interest in and use of the negative for artistic purposes. The essays range from philological to psychoanalytic approaches to the literature, and they examine writing from all stages of the authors’ careers. The essays do not seek a direct comparison of author to author; rather they lay out the intellectual and philosophical foundations of their work, and are of interest to the beginning student as well as to the specialist.

Beckett's Words

Beckett's Words PDF Author: David Kleinberg-Levin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474216889
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
At stake in this book is a struggle with language in a time when our old faith in the redeeming of the word-and the word's power to redeem-has almost been destroyed. Drawing on Benjamin's political theology, his interpretation of the German Baroque mourning play, and Adorno's critical aesthetic theory, but also on the thought of poets and many other philosophers, especially Hegel's phenomenology of spirit, Nietzsche's analysis of nihilism, and Derrida's writings on language, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, because of its communicative and revelatory powers, language bears the utopian "promise of happiness," the idea of a secular redemption of humanity, at the very heart of which must be the achievement of universal justice. In an original reading of Beckett's plays, novels and short stories, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, despite inheriting a language damaged, corrupted and commodified, Beckett redeems dead or dying words and wrests from this language new possibilities for the expression of meaning. Without denying Beckett's nihilism, his picture of a radically disenchanted world, Kleinberg-Levin calls attention to moments when his words suddenly ignite and break free of their despair and pain, taking shape in the beauty of an austere yet joyous lyricism, suggesting that, after all, meaning is still possible.

Beckett’s Art of Mismaking

Beckett’s Art of Mismaking PDF Author: Leland de la Durantaye
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674504852
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
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.

Iconic Spaces

Iconic Spaces PDF Author: Sandra Wynands
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780268044107
Category : Spiritual life in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Iconic Spaces looks at Samuel Beckett's mature theatrical work as a displaced theology of the icon. Sandra Wynands rejects conventional existentialist or nihilist interpretations of Beckett's work, arguing instead that beneath the text, in the depths of language and being, Beckett creates an absolutely irreducible, transcendent space. She traces a nondual model of perception and experience through a selection of Beckett's art-critical and dramatic works, focusing in particular on four minimalist plays: Catastrophe, Not I, Quad, and Film. Iconic Spaces makes an important contribution to scholars and students of literature, philosophy, theatre studies, and religion by giving them an exciting new way of reading and experiencing Beckett's work. "This is an original, adventurous, and absorbing book. It deploys an acute understanding of contemporary philosophical writing in order to address the demands Beckett makes on his readers and spectators in nonreductive, affirmative fashion; and it also reinvigorates our understanding of Beckett's relationship to religion and theology by exploring in some detail, and, arguably for the first time, the extent of Beckett's engagement as a writer, not with positive religion, but with apophatic religious thought." --Leslie Hill, University of Warwick "In this remarkable and scrupulously argued book about Samuel Beckett, Sandra Wynands provides a compelling analysis of the postmodern experience of God's absence. She does so partly by showing how atheism, rigorously deconstructed, can converge with the insights and strategies of negative theology. Sandra Wynands is daringly insightful about Beckett, while also situating his work within a set of historical and cultural parameters that are described with impressive learning and breadth of vision." --Patrick Grant, University of Victoria "Iconic Spaces is an impressive piece of work. In exploring the relationship between 'negative theology' and Samuel Beckett's late work for the stage, Sandra Wynands makes an original and important contribution to Beckett studies and to modern drama and theatre studies more generally. Her discussion ranges widely across difficult and complex disciplinary, theoretical, philosophical, and critical materials with notable maturity and clarity, providing startlingly original insights on almost every page." --Ric Knowles, University of Guelph

On Beckett

On Beckett PDF Author: S. E. Gontarski
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 0857285807
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
“On Beckett: Essays and Criticism” is the first collection of writings about the Nobel Prize–winning author that covers the entire spectrum of his work, and also affords a rare glimpse of the private Beckett. More has been written about Samuel Beckett than about any other writer of this century – countless books and articles dealing with him are in print, and the progression continues geometrically. “On Beckett” brings together some of the most perceptive writings from the vast amount of scrutiny that has been lavished on the man; in addition to widely read essays there are contributions from more obscure sources, viewpoints not frequently seen. Together they allow the reader to enter the world of a writer whose work has left an impact on the consciousness of our time perhaps unmatched by that of any other recent creative imagination.

Beckett's Art of Salvage

Beckett's Art of Salvage PDF Author: Julie Bates
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107167043
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Introduction: Miscellaneous Rubbish -- Relics -- Heirlooms -- Props -- Treasure -- Conclusion

Beckett’s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism

Beckett’s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism PDF Author: Nick Wolterman
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031056507
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Samuel Beckett’s work is littered with ironic self-reflexive comments on presumed audience expectations that it should ultimately make explicable sense. An ample store of letters and anecdotes suggests Beckett’s own preoccupation with and resistance to similar interpretive mindsets. Yet until now such concerns have remained the stuff of scholarly footnotes and asides. Beckett’s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism addresses these issues head-on and investigates how Beckett’s ideas about who he writes for affect what he writes. What it finds speaks to current understandings not only of Beckett’s techniques and ambitions, but also of modernism’s experiments as fundamentally compromised challenges to enshrined ways of understanding and organizing the social world. Beckett’s uniquely anxious audience-targeting brings out similarly self-doubting strategies in the work of other experimental twentieth-century writers and artists in whom he is interested: his corpus proves emblematic of a modernism that understands its inability to achieve transformative social effects all at once, but that nevertheless judiciously complicates too-neat distinctions drawn within ongoing culture wars. For its re-evaluations of four key points of orientation for understanding Beckett’s artistic ambitions—his arch critical pronouncements, his postwar conflations of value and valuelessness, his often-ambiguous self-commentary, and his sardonic metatheatrical play—as well as for its running dialogue with wider debates around modernism as a social phenomenon, this book is of interest to students and researchers interested in Beckett, modernism, and the relations between modern and contemporary artistic and social developments.

Granular Modernism

Granular Modernism PDF Author: Beci Carver
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198709927
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Granular Modernism understands the way that some modernist texts put themselves together as a way of pulling themselves apart. In this volume, Beci Carver offers a new way of reading Modernist texts, by drawing attention to the anomalies that make them difficult to summarise or simplify. Carver proposes that rather than trying to find the shapes of narrative or argument in their writing, the 'Granular Modernists'- - namely, Joseph Conrad, William Gerhardie, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, and Samuel Beckett -- experiment in certain of their works in finding the shapelessness of a moment in history that increasingly confidently called itself 'modern', which was to call itself shapeless. The project of modernism in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, was to find a story to tell about an era full of beginnings. The project of 'Granular Modernism' was to find a way of turning the inchoateness of the modern moment into art. Granular Modernism takes from the Naturalist movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth century its attentiveness to the process of mundane experiences like eating or waiting. But where Naturalism sets out to offer a complete picture of a way of life, Granular Modernism's eating and waiting fail to amount to anything more; to paraphrase Evelyn Waugh: 'The most they can hope for is a cumulative futility.' Frank Norris once described one of Stephen Crane's narrators as: 'a locust in a grain elevator attempting to empty the silo by carrying off one grain at a time.' Norris is being dismissive. But his image of pointless, meticulous, indefinite manoeuvre potentially defines the ambition of the Granular Modernists.

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett PDF Author: Pascale Casanova
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1786635712
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
In this fascinating new exploration of Samuel Beckett’s work, Pascale Casanova argues that Beckett’s reputation rests on a pervasive misreading of his oeuvre, which neglects entirely the literary revolution he instigated. Reintroducing the historical into the heart of this body of work, Casanova provides an arresting portrait of Beckett as radically subversive—doing for writing what Kandinsky did for art—and in the process presents the key to some of the most profound enigmas of Beckett’s writing.