Beckett and Poststructuralism

Beckett and Poststructuralism
Author: Anthony Uhlmann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 1999-09-02
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780521640763

In Beckett and Poststructuralism, Anthony Uhlmann offers a reading of Beckett in relation to French philosophy, particularly the work of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Levinas, and Derrida. Uhlmann offers a work of literary criticism that is also a piece of intellectual history, emphasizing how Beckett develops a kind of critical thinking which differs from yet is just as powerful as that of philosophers who, along with Beckett, found themselves faced with sets of ethical problems which were thrown into sharp relief in post-war France. Uhlmann explores the links between ethics and physical existence in Beckett, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, and between ethics and language in Beckett, Derrida and Levinas, showing how post-war French philosophy was powerfully affected by Beckett's work. Literature is not reduced to philosophy or vice versa; rather Uhlmann considers how they interrelate and overlap, informing and deforming one another, and how both encounter history.

Repetition, Difference, and Knowledge in the Work of Samuel Beckett, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze

Repetition, Difference, and Knowledge in the Work of Samuel Beckett, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze
Author: Sarah Gendron
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2008
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781433103759

Repetition, Difference, and Knowledge dialogues with novels, theatre, philosophy, and literary theory in order to explore how three thinkers - Samuel Beckett, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze - employ repetition as a means with which to radically unsettle some of the most fundamental notions of the human experience (among them, time, presence, originality, and being). Due to its interdisciplinary scope and its focus on repetition as an epistemological concept, this book will attract a broad audience of academic specialists across the humanities from the fields of literary criticism, philosophy, French studies, and poststructural studies. Its simplicity of style, deliberate avoidance of complex jargon, and clarity of argument - particularly when dealing with complicated theoretical ideas and texts - also makes it an invaluable tool for use in both graduate- and undergraduate-level literature and philosophy courses. Repetition, Difference, and Knowledge provides experienced and beginning scholars alike with greater insight into the works of Beckett, Derrida, and Deleuze and into the role that repetition has played and continues to play in determining how we read our world and come to meaning.

Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction

Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction
Author: James Baxter
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2021-11-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030815722

Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction provides an overdue investigation into Beckett’s rich influences over American writing. Through in-depth readings of postmodern authors such as Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster and Lydia Davis, this book situates Beckett’s post-war writing of exhaustion and generation in relation to the emergence of an explosive American avant-garde. In turn, this study provides a valuable insight into the practical realities of Beckett’s dissemination in America, following the author’s long-standing relationship with the countercultural magazine Evergreen Review and its dramatic role in redrawing the possibilities of American culture in the 1960s. While Beckett would be largely removed from his American context, this book follows his vigorous, albeit sometimes awkward, reception alongside the authors and institutions central to shaping his legacies in 20th and 21st century America.

Beckett and Phenomenology

Beckett and Phenomenology
Author: Ulrika Maude
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2009-07-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0826497144

A collection of research by leading international scholars on Beckett and phenomenology - both comparing and contrasting his work with key figures in phenomenology and analysing phenomenological themes and their dramatization in Beckett's work.

Silence in Modern Literature and Philosophy

Silence in Modern Literature and Philosophy
Author: Thomas Gould
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2018-07-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319934791

This book discusses the elusive centrality of silence in modern literature and philosophy, focusing on the writing and theory of Jean-Luc Nancy and Roland Barthes, the prose of Samuel Beckett, and the poetry of Wallace Stevens. It suggests that silence is best understood according to two categories: apophasis and reticence. Apophasis is associated with theology, and relates to a silence of ineffability and transcendence; reticence is associated with phenomenology, and relates to a silence of listenership and speechlessness. In a series of diverse though interrelated readings, the study examines figures of broken silence and silent voice in the prose of Samuel Beckett, the notion of shared silence in Jean-Luc Nancy and Roland Barthes, and ways in which the poetry of Wallace Stevens mounts lyrical negotiations with forms of unsayability and speechlessness.

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 After Beckett

Beckett After Beckett
Author: S. E. Gontarski
Publisher: Crosscurrents
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2006
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780813029092

Features essays, which examine Beckett's reputation "after Beckett," the years of scholarship and performance since his death in 1989. Focusing on the afterimage that lingers as a memory - a persistent, evocative, hovering, but not present impression that haunted Beckett and his work - the contributors critique how Beckett's work haunts history.

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett
Author: Jennifer Birkett
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2014-06-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317885821

Bringing together seminal writings on Beckett from the 1950s and 1960s with critical readings from the 1980s and 1990s, this collection is inspired by a wide variety of literary-theoretical approaches and covers the whole range of Beckett's creative work. Following an up-to-date review and analysis of Beckett criticism, fifteen extracts of Beckett criticism are introduced and set in context by editors' headnotes. The book aims to make easily accessible to students and scholars stimulating and innovative writing on the work of Samuel Beckett, representing the wide range of new perspectives opened up by contemporary critical theory: philosophical, political and psychoanalytic criticism, feminist and gender studies, semiotics, and reception theory.

Beckett's Political Imagination

Beckett's Political Imagination
Author: Emilie Morin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2017-09-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108305652

Beckett's Political Imagination charts unexplored territory: it investigates how Beckett's bilingual texts re-imagine political history, and documents the conflicts and controversies through which Beckett's political consciousness and affirmations were mediated. The book offers a startling account of Beckett's work, tracing the many political causes that framed his writing, commitments, collaborations and friendships, from the Scottsboro Boys to the Black Panthers, from Irish communism to Spanish republicanism to Algerian nationalism, and from campaigns against Irish and British censorship to anti-Apartheid and international human rights movements. Emilie Morin reveals a very different writer, whose career and work were shaped by a unique exposure to international politics, an unconventional perspective on political action and secretive political engagements. The book will benefit students, researchers and readers who want to think about literary history in different ways and are interested in Beckett's enduring appeal and influence.