Author: Julie BatesPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107167043
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251
Book Description
Introduction: Miscellaneous Rubbish -- Relics -- Heirlooms -- Props -- Treasure -- Conclusion
Beckett's Art of Salvage
Author: Julie BatesPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107167043
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251
Book Description
Introduction: Miscellaneous Rubbish -- Relics -- Heirlooms -- Props -- Treasure -- Conclusion
Cacaphonies
Author: Annabel L. KimPublisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452965404
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Book Description
Exploring why there is so much fecal matter in literary works that matter Cacaphonies takes fecal matter and its place in literature seriously. Readers and critics have too long overlooked excrement’s vital role in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century French canon. In a stark challenge to the tendency to view this literature through sanitizing abstractions, Annabel L. Kim undertakes close readings of key authors to argue for feces as a figure of radical equality, both a literary object and a reflection on literature itself, without which literary studies is impoverished and sterile. Following the fecal through line in works by Céline, Beckett, Genet, Sartre, Duras, and Gary and the contemporary authors Anne Garréta and Daniel Pennac, Kim shows that shit, far from vanishing from the canon after the early modern period, remains present in the modern and contemporary French literature that follows. She argues that all the shit in the canon expresses a call to democratize literature, making literature for all, just as shit is for (or of) all. She attends to its presence in this prized element of French identity, treating it as a continually uttered desire to manifest the universality France aspires to—as encapsulated by the slogan Liberté, égalité, fraternité—but fails to realize. In shit there is a concrete universalism that traverses bodies with disregard for embodied differences. Cacaphonies reminds us that literature, and the ideas to be found therein, cannot be separated from the corporeal envelopes that create and receive them. In so doing, it reveals the aesthetic, political, and ethical potential of shit and its capacity to transform literature and life.
Simply Beckett
Author: Katherine WeissPublisher: Simply Charly
ISBN: 1943657793
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 122
Book Description
“Katherine Weiss’ Simply Beckett is a beautifully written book, one brimming with fresh critical insights. What is obvious is her utter command of her material. As part of the Simply Charly series, the book is designed for university students and theatergoers, but, in fact, it also appeals to scholars long familiar with Beckett’s work. Drawing on history, politics, trauma, and memory, Weiss leads the reader through Beckett’s plays in clear, engaging prose. In sum, Weiss’ book has the reach and depth to make it one of the more important coordinates in Beckett scholarship.” —Matthew Roudané, Regents’ Professor of English and Theater, Georgia State University Born in Dublin on Good Friday, Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) attended Trinity College and taught briefly in Belfast before moving to Paris, where he lived for most of his adult life. Deeply influenced by James Joyce, who became a close friend and mentor, he published poetry, novels, essays, and reviews before stunning Paris, and eventually the rest of the world, with his play Waiting for Godot in 1953. Famously described by one critic as “a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats,” Godot redefined dramatic structure and showcased Beckett’s commitment to an art based on the ideas of “non-knowing” and powerlessness. In Simply Beckett, professor Katherine Weiss provides a highly accessible and insightful introduction to the award-winning author and his paradoxical works, with a particular focus on Beckett’s theater activities, both as a writer and director. Through discussion of the written texts, significant productions of the plays, and audience and critical reactions to Beckett’s work, Weiss helps the reader understand the groundbreaking nature of his achievements and points the way toward a greater appreciation of his oeuvre. Combining admirable erudition with reader-friendly style, Simply Beckett is a fascinating journey into the world of an author whose work went to the heart of the human condition.
Text & Presentation, 2017
Author: Jay MalarcherPublisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476670366
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Book Description
Presenting some of the best work from the 2017 Comparative Drama Conference at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, this collection highlights the latest research in comparative drama, performance and dramatic textual analysis. Contributors cover a broad range of topics, from the "practical ethnography" of directing foreign language productions to writing for theoretical stages to the "radical deaf theater" of Aaron Sawyer's The Vineyard. A full transcript of the keynote conversation with American playwright and screenwriter Lisa Loomer is included.
Samuel Beckett's Geological Imagination
Author: Mark ByronPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108800033
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 148
Book Description
Samuel Beckett's Geological Imagination addresses the ubiquity of earthy objects in Beckett's prose, drama and poetry, exploring how mineral and archaeological objects bear upon the themes, narrative locus, and sensibilities of Beckett's texts in surprisingly varied ways. By deploying figures of ruination and excavation with etymological self-awareness, Beckett's late prose narratives – Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho – comprise a late-career meditation on the stratigraphic layerings of language and memory over an extended writing career. These layers comprise an embodied record of writing in their allusions to literary history and to Beckett's own oeuvre.
Samuel Beckett's Poetry
Author: James BrophyPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009222589
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287
Book Description
Samuel Beckett's Poetry is the first book-length study of Beckett's complete poetry, designed for students and scholars of twentieth century poetry and literature, as well as for specialists of Beckett's work. This volume explores how poetry provided Beckett a medium of expression during key moments in his life, from his earliest attempts at securing a reputation as a published writer, to the work of restoring his own speech while suffering aphasia shortly before his death. Often these were moments of desperation and discouragement, when more substantial works were not possible: moments of illness, of personal loss or of public disaster. This volume includes an introduction that contextualizes Beckett as a poet and a chronology of the composition and publication of all his known poems. Essays offer a range of critical perspectives, from translation theory, war poetics and Irish Studies to Beckett's debts to Modernism, Romanticism and the Jazz Age.
Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance
Author: Hannah SimpsonPublisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303104133X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 243
Book Description
Beckett’s plays have attracted a striking range of disability performances – that is, performances that cast disabled actors, regardless of whether their roles are explicitly described as ‘disabled’ in the text. Grounded in the history of disability performance of Beckett’s work and a new theorising of Beckett’s treatment of the impaired body, Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance examines four contemporary disability performances of Beckett’s plays, staged in the UK and US, and brings the rich fields of Beckett studies and disability studies into mutually illuminating conversation. Pairing original interviews with the actors and directors involved in these productions alongside critical analysis underpinned by recent disability and performance theory, this book explores how these productions emphasise or rework previously undetected indicators of disability in Beckett’s work. More broadly, it reveals how Beckett’s theatre compulsively interrogates alternative embodiments, unexpected forms of agency, and the extraordinary social interdependency of the human body.
The New Irish Studies
Author: Paige ReynoldsPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108677169
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 309
Book Description
The New Irish Studies demonstrates how diverse critical approaches enable a richer understanding of contemporary Irish writing and culture. The early decades of the twenty-first century in Ireland and Northern Ireland have seen an astonishing rate of change, one that reflects the common understanding of the contemporary as a moment of acceleration and flux. This collection tracks how Irish writers have represented the peace and reconciliation process in Northern Ireland, the consequences of the Celtic Tiger economic boom in the Republic, the waning influence of Catholicism, the increased authority of diverse voices, and an altered relationship with Europe. The essays acknowledge the distinctiveness of contemporary Irish literature, reflecting a sense that the local can shed light on the global, even as they reach beyond the limited tropes that have long identified Irish literature. The collection suggests routes forward for Irish Studies, and unsettles presumptions about what constitutes an Irish classic.
Shakespeare and Beckett
Author: Claudia OlkPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009084844
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251
Book Description
'The danger is in the neatness of identifications', Samuel Beckett famously stated, and, at first glance, no two authors could be further distant from one another than William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett. This book addresses the vast intertextual network between the works of both writers and explores the resonant correspondences between them. It analyses where and how these resonances manifest themselves in their aesthetics, theatre, language and form. It traces convergences and inversions across both œuvres that resound beyond their conditions of production and possibility. Uncovering hitherto unexplored relations between the texts of an early modern and a late modern author, this study seeks to offer fresh readings of single passages and entire works, but it will also describe productive tensions and creative incongruences between them.
Beckett's Thing
Author: David LloydPublisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474415733
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268
Book Description
Beckett 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.
