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Author: Cristina Ionica
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030349020
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
The Affects, Cognition, and Politics of Samuel Beckett’s Postwar Drama and Fiction: Revolutionary and Evolutionary Paradoxes theorizes the revolutionary and evolutionary import of Beckett’s works in a global context defined by increasingly ubiquitous and insidious mechanisms of capture, exploitation, and repression, alongside unprecedented demands for high-volume information-processing and connectivity. Part I shows that, in generating consistent flows of solidarity-based angry laughter, Beckett’s works sabotage coercive couplings of the subject to social machines by translating subordination and repression into processes rather than data of experience. Through an examination of Beckett’s attack on gender/ class-related normative injunctions, the book shows that Beckett’s works can generate solidarity and action-oriented affects in readers/ spectators regardless of their training in textual analysis. Part II proposes that Beckett’s works can weaken the cognitive dominance of constrictive “frames” in readers/ audiences, so that toxic ideological formations such as the association of safety and comfort with simplicity and “sameness” are rejected and more complex cognitive operations are welcomed instead—a process that bolsters the mind’s ability to operate at ease with increasingly complex, malleable, extensible, and inclusive frames, as well as with increasing volumes of information.
Author: Cristina Ionica
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030349020
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
The Affects, Cognition, and Politics of Samuel Beckett’s Postwar Drama and Fiction: Revolutionary and Evolutionary Paradoxes theorizes the revolutionary and evolutionary import of Beckett’s works in a global context defined by increasingly ubiquitous and insidious mechanisms of capture, exploitation, and repression, alongside unprecedented demands for high-volume information-processing and connectivity. Part I shows that, in generating consistent flows of solidarity-based angry laughter, Beckett’s works sabotage coercive couplings of the subject to social machines by translating subordination and repression into processes rather than data of experience. Through an examination of Beckett’s attack on gender/ class-related normative injunctions, the book shows that Beckett’s works can generate solidarity and action-oriented affects in readers/ spectators regardless of their training in textual analysis. Part II proposes that Beckett’s works can weaken the cognitive dominance of constrictive “frames” in readers/ audiences, so that toxic ideological formations such as the association of safety and comfort with simplicity and “sameness” are rejected and more complex cognitive operations are welcomed instead—a process that bolsters the mind’s ability to operate at ease with increasingly complex, malleable, extensible, and inclusive frames, as well as with increasing volumes of information.
Author: William Davies
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9783030471125
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
This collection of essays reveals the extent to which politics is fundamental to our understanding of Samuel Beckett’s life and writing. Bringing together internationally established and emerging scholars, Beckett and Politics considers Beckett’s work as it relates to three broad areas of political discourse: language politics, biopolitics and geopolitics. Through a range of critical approaches, including performance studies, political theory, gender theory, historicizing approaches and language theory, the book demonstrates how politics is more than just another thematic lens: it is fundamentally and structurally intrinsic to Beckett’s life, his texts and subsequent interpretations of them. This important collection of essays demonstrates that Beckett’s work is not only ripe for political engagement, but also contains significant opportunities for understanding and illuminating the broader relationships between literature, culture and politics.
Author: Amanda M. Dennis
Publisher: Other Becketts
ISBN: 9781474462990
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Reveals how the body in Beckett, embedded in its material environment, exhibits embodied agency This book argues that the abject, decrepit body in Beckett does not signal the impossibility of agency but demands its reconceptualisation. Analysing the representation of the body in relation to the environment in Beckett's work, the author interrogates the power to do and act. Separating dynamic interaction from willed intention, Amanda Dennis shows how Beckett's oeuvre refashions subjectivity in dialogue with a disintegrating environment. The book provides a phenomenological reading of Beckett to argue that sensation and embodiment support our interactions with our material world, enabling possibilities for embodied agency in collaboration with our physical and linguistic surroundings. Amanda Dennis is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the American University of Paris.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401205043
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
This collection of essays – the first volume in the Dialogue series – brings together new and experienced scholars to present innovative critical approaches to Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame. These essays broach a broad range of topics, many of which are inherently controversial and have generated significant levels of debate in the past. Critical readings of the play in relation to music, metaphysics, intertextuality, and time are counterpointed by essays that consider the nature of performance, the history of the theater and the music hall, Beckett’s attitudes to directing his play, and his responses to other directors. This collection will be of special interest to Beckett scholars, to students of literature and drama, and to drama theorists and practitioners.
Author: G. Herren
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137109084
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
This is the first book devoted Beckett's innovative work for the big- and small-screens. Herren examines each of Beckett's film and television plays in depth, emphasizing the central role that memory plays in these haunting works.
Author: Rhys Tranter
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3838210352
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
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.
Author: Joseph Anderton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474234542
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
In the shadow of the Holocaust, Samuel Beckett captures humanity in ruins through his debased beings and a decomposing mode of writing that strives to 'fail better'. But what might it mean to be a 'creature' or 'creaturely' in Beckett's world? In the first full-length study of the concept of the creature in Beckett's prose and drama, this book traces the suspended lives and melancholic existences of Beckett's ignorant and impotent creatures to assess the extent to which political value marks the divide between human and inhuman. Through close readings of Beckett's prose and drama, particularly texts from the middle period, including Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Anderton explicates four arenas of creaturely life in Beckett. Each chapter attends to a particular theme – testimony, power, humour and survival – to analyse a range of pressures and impositions that precipitate the creaturely state of suspension. Drawing on the writings of Adorno, Agamben, Benjamin, Deleuze and Derrida to explore the overlaps between artistic and political structures of creation, the creature emerges as an in-between figure that bespeaks the provisional nature of the human. The result is a provocative examination of the indirect relationship between art and history through Beckett's treatment of testimony, power, humour and survival, which each attest to the destabilisation of meaning after Auschwitz.
Author: M. Bennett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230118828
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 179
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Book Description
Fifty years after the publication of Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd , which suggests that 'absurd' plays purport the meaninglessness of life, this book uses the works of five major playwrights of the 1950s to provide a timely reassessment of one of the most important theatre 'movements' of the 20th century.
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.
Author: Matthew H. Bowker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317975103
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160
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Book Description
What does it mean to describe something or someone as absurd? Why did absurd philosophy and literature become so popular amidst the violent conflicts and terrors of the mid- to late-twentieth century? Is it possible to understand absurdity not as a feature of events, but as a psychological posture or stance? If so, what are the objectives, dynamics, and repercussions of the absurd stance? And in what ways has the absurd stance continued to shape postmodern thought and contemporary culture? In Rethinking the Politics of Absurdity, Matthew H. Bowker offers a surprising account of absurdity as a widespread endeavor to make parts of our experience meaningless. In the last century, he argues, fears about subjects’ destructive desires have combined with fears about rationality in a way that has made the absurd stance seem attractive. Drawing upon diverse sources from philosophy, literature, politics, psychoanalysis, theology, and contemporary culture, Bowker identifies the absurd effort to make aspects of our histories, our selves, and our public projects meaningless with postmodern revolts against reason and subjectivity. Weaving together analyses of the work of Albert Camus, Georges Bataille, Judith Butler, Emmanuel Levinas, and others with interview data and popular narratives of apocalypse and survival, Bowker shows that the absurd stance and the postmodern revolt invite a kind of bargain, in which meaning is sacrificed in exchange for the survival of innocence. Bowker asks us to consider that the very premise of this bargain is false: that ethical subjects and healthy communities cannot be created in absurdity. Instead, we must make meaningful even the most shocking losses, terrors, and destructive powers with which we live. Bowker's book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners in the fields of political science, philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, sociology, and cultural studies.
