The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts

by Gontarski, S. E.

• ISBN13: 9780748675685
• ISBN10: 074867568X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-03-28
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Summary

A landmark collection showcasing the diversity of Samuel Beckett's creative output

The 35 original chapters in this Companion capture the continued vitality of Beckett studies in drama, music and the visual arts and establish rich and varied cultural contexts for Beckett's work world-wide.

As well as considering topics such as Beckett and science, historiography, geocriticism and philosophy, the volume focuses on the post-centenary impetus within Beckett studies, emphasising a return to primary sources amid letters, drafts, and other documents. Major Beckett critics such as Steven Connor, David Lloyd, Andrew Gibson, John Pilling, Jean-Michel Rabaté, and Mark Nixon, as well as emerging researchers, present the latest critical thinking in 9 key areas: Art & Aesthetics; The Body; Fiction; Film, Radio & Television; Global Beckett; Language / Writing; Philosophy; Reading; and Theatre & Performance.

Edited by eminent Beckett scholar S. E. Gontarski, the Companion draws on the most vital, ground-breaking research to outline the nature of Beckett studies for the next generation.

Author Biography

S. E. Gontarski is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University, Ph.D., Ohio State (1974) and specializes in twentieth-century Irish Studies, in British, U.S., and European Modernism, and in performance theory. He has been awarded four National Endowment for the Humanities research grants, has twice been awarded Fulbright Professorships, has been Guest Editor of the following: American Book Review, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Modern Fiction Studies and most recently Drammaturgia. He is also General Editor of three book series: 1) Crosscurrents: Comparative Studies in European Literature and Philosophy with the University Press of Florida and 2) Anthem Studies in Theatre and Performance with Anthem Press, London; and 3) (with Paul Ardoin and Laci Mattison) Understanding Philosophy / Understanding Modernism with Bloomsbury. He edited the Journal of Beckett Studies from 1989-2008, and currently serves as Co-Editor with its publication by Edinburgh University Press.

Table of Contents

Introduction Towards a Minoritarian Criticism: The Questions We Ask, S. E. Gontarski

Art & Aesthetics
'Deux besoins': Samuel Beckett and the Aesthetic Dilemma, C. J. Ackerley
Siege Laid again: Arikha's Gaze, Beckett's Painted Stage, David Lloyd
Convulsive Aesthetics: Beckett, Charcot, Chaplin, Ulrika Maude
Pain Degree Zero, Sam Slote

Fictions
Sexual Indifference in the Three Novels, Paul Stewart
A Neuropolitics of Subjectivity: Samuel Beckett's Three Novels, Andrew McFeaters
Evening, Night, and other Shades of Dark: Beckett's Short Prose, Tomasz Wisniewski

A European Context
French Beckett and French Literary Politics 1945-52, Andrew Gibson
Beckett/Sade: Texts for Nothing, John Pilling
Beckett's Masson: From Abstraction to Non-Relation, Jean-Michel Rabaté
Beckett, Duthuit, and Ongoing Dialogue, Anthony Uhlmann
Gloria SMH and Beckett's Linguistic Encryptions, Laura Salisbury
'I am writing a manifesto because I have nothing to say': Samuel Beckett and the Inter-War Avant-garde, Peter Fifield
Beckett and Contemporary French Literature, Sjef Houpermans

An Irish Context
Beckett and the 'Irish' Translation of Godot, Anthony Roche
Odds, Ends, Beginnings: Samuel Beckett and Theatre Cultures in 1930s Dublin, Emilie Morin
'Bid Us Sigh on': Beckett and the Irish Big House, Sean Kennedy

Film, Radio & Television
A Womb with a View: Film as Regression Fantasy., Graley Herren
'The Sound Is Enough': Beckett's Radio Plays, Everett C. Frost
Language / Writing
Was That a Point? Beckett's Punctuation, Steven Connor
Beckett's Unpublished Canon, Mark Nixon
Textual Scars: Beckett, Genetic Criticism and Textual Scholarship, Dirk van Hulle
Beckett's Ill Seen Ill Said: Reading the Subject, Subject to Reading, Adam Piette

Philosophies
Beckett and Philosophy, Matthew Feldman
'Ruse a by': Watt, the Rupture of the Everyday, and Transcendental Empiricism, S. E. Gontarski
Beckett, Modernism and Christianity, Erik Tonning

Theatre & Performance
'Oh lovely Art': Beckett and Music, David Tucker
Victimized Actors and Despotic Directors: Clichés of Theatre at Stake in Beckett's Catastrophe, Laura Peja
Beyond Eliot and Joyce: Restaging Solo Literary Performance in A Piece of Monologue, John Paul Riquelme
Designing Beckett: Jocelyn Herbert's Contribution to Samuel Beckett's Theatrical Aesthetics, Anna McMullan
Dianoetic Laughter in Tragedy: Accepting Finitude, Annamaria Cascetta
Performing the Formless, Geneviève Chevallier

Global Beckett
Facing other Windows: Beckett in South America, Fábio de Souza Andrade
Beckett in Belgrade, Predrag Todorovic
Struggling With a Dead Language: Language of Others in All That Fall and the Japanese Avant-garde Theatre in the 1960s, Mariko Hori Tanaka