A Beckett Canon

A Beckett Canon
Author: Ruby Cohn
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2010-05-25
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0472025937

Samuel Beckett is unique in literature. Born and educated in Ireland, he lived most of his life in Paris. His literary output was rendered in either English or French, and he often translated one to the other, but there is disagreement about the contents of his bilingual corpus. A Beckett Canon by renowned theater scholar Ruby Cohn offers an invaluable guide to the entire corpus, commenting on Beckett's work in its original language. Beginning in 1929 with Beckett's earliest work, the book examines the variety of genres in which he worked: poems, short stories, novels, plays, radio pieces, teleplays, reviews, and criticism. Cohn grapples with the difficulties in Beckett's work, including the opaque erudition of the early English verse and fiction, and the searching depths and syntactical ellipsis of the late works. Specialist and nonspecialist readers will find A Beckett Canon valuable for its remarkable inclusiveness. Cohn has examined the holdings of all of the major Beckett depositories, and is thus able to highlight neglected manuscripts and correct occasional errors in their listings. Intended as a resource to accompany the reading of Beckett's writing--in English or French, published or unpublished, in part or as a whole--the book offers context, information, and interpretation of the work of one of the last century's most important writers. Ruby Cohn is Professor Emerita of Comparative Drama, University of California, Davis. She is author or editor of many books, including Anglo-American Interplay in Recent Drama; Retreats from Realism in Recent English Drama; From Desire to Godot; and Just Play: Beckett's Theater.

The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett

The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett
Author: Dirk Van Hulle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2015-01-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 110707519X

The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett offers an accessible introduction to issues animating the field of Beckett studies today.

Watt

Watt
Author: Samuel Beckett
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2009-06-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 080219835X

In prose possessed of the radically stripped-down beauty and ferocious wit that characterize his work, this early novel by Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett recounts the grotesque and improbable adventures of a fantastically logical Irish servant and his master. Watt is a beautifully executed black comedy that, at its core, is rooted in the powerful and terrifying vision that made Beckett one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.

Samuel Beckett in Context

Samuel Beckett in Context
Author: Anthony Uhlmann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2013-02-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107017033

Provides a comprehensive exploration of Beckett's historical, cultural and philosophical contexts, offering new critical insights for scholars and general readers.

Beckett and media

Beckett and media
Author: Balazs Rapcsak
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2022-03-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1526145820

Beckett and media provides the first sustained examination of the relationship between Beckett and media technologies. The book analyses the rich variety of technical objects, semiotic arrangements, communication processes and forms of data processing that Beckett’s work so uniquely engages with, as well as those that – in historically changing configurations – determine the continuing performance, the audience reception, and the scholarly study of this work. Beckett and media draws on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, such as media archaeology, in order to discuss Beckett’s intermedial oeuvre. As such, the book engages with Beckett as a media artist and examines the way his engagement with media technologies continues to speak to our cultural situation.

The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-Century Europe

The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-Century Europe
Author: Kathryn Brown
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351546430

Investigating the complex history of visual art?s engagement with literature, this collection demonstrates that the art of the book is a fully interdisciplinary and distinctly modern form. The essays in the collection develop new critical approaches to the analysis of twentieth-century bookworks and explore ways in which European writers and painters challenged the boundary between visual and linguistic expression in the content, production, and physical form of books. The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-Century Europe offers a detailed examination of word-image relations in forms ranging from the livre d?artiste to personal diaries and almanacs. It analyzes innovative attempts to challenge familiar hierarchies between texts and images, to fuse different expressive media, and to reconceptualize traditional notions of ekphrasis. Giving consideration to the material qualities of books, the works discussed in this collection also test and celebrate the act of reading, while locating it in the context of other sensory experiences. Essays examine works by Dufy, Matisse, Beckett, Kandinsky, Braque, and Ponge, among other European artists and writers active during the twentieth century.

Beckett’s Art of Mismaking

Beckett’s Art of Mismaking
Author: Leland de la Durantaye
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2016-01-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0674495853

Readers have long responded to Samuel Beckett’s novels and plays with wonder or bafflement. They portray blind, lame, maimed creatures cracking whips and wielding can openers who are funny when they should be chilling, cruel when they should be tender, warm when most wounded. His works seem less to conclude than to stop dead. And so readers quite naturally ask: what might all this be meant to mean? In a lively and enlivening study of a singular creative nature, Leland de la Durantaye helps us better understand Beckett’s strangeness and the notorious difficulties it presents. He argues that Beckett’s lifelong campaign was to mismake on purpose—not to denigrate himself, or his audience, nor even to reconnect with the child or the savage within, but because he believed that such mismaking is in the interest of art and will shape its future. Whether called “creative willed mismaking,” “logoclasm,” or “word-storming in the name of beauty,” Beckett meant by these terms an art that attacks language and reason, unity and continuity, art and life, with wit and venom. Beckett’s Art of Mismaking explains Beckett’s views on language, the relation between work and world, and the interactions between stage and page, as well as the motives guiding his sixty-year-long career—his strange decision to adopt French as his literary language, swerve from the complex novels to the minimalist plays, determination to “fail better,” and principled refusal to follow any easy path to originality.

Beckett Critical Reader

Beckett Critical Reader
Author: S.E. Gontarski
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2019-07-30
Genre: LITERARY CRITICISM
ISBN: 1474468551

The Reader makes readily available for the first time 17 major, previously uncollected significant essays from the Journal of Beckett Studies from 1992 to the present.

Beckett's Dedalus

Beckett's Dedalus
Author: Peter J. Murphy
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2009-01-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442692642

Given that the Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) was personally acquainted with the modernist master James Joyce, and even helped research and promote Finnegans Wake, it should come as no surprise that Beckett was greatly influenced by Joyce's own work. However, much analysis of Beckett's work tends to argue that he forged his own artistic identity in opposition to Joyce, seeking and eventually finding styles and methods unoccupied by his "mentor." Beckett's Dedalus is a comprehensive reassessment of this line of criticism and traces the nature and extent of Joyce's influence in more complex, contestatory, and complementary ways throughout all of Beckett's major fiction. 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, especially A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and, in particular, its protagonist Stephen Dedalus. This study proposes that the relationship between the two writers was a complex life-giving and art-building dialogue concerned with aesthetic theories, depictions of reality, and the artistic integrity needed to carry out these critical investigations. emBeckett's Dedalus is a fascinating study of the literary influence one generation has on the next. It will change the way we consider the relationship between two of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.