Author: John Calder Publisher: Alma Books ISBN: 0714545546 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 161
Book Description
ncreasingly Samuel Beckett's writing is seen as the culmination of the great literature of the twentieth century - succeeding the work of Proust, Joyce and Kafka. Beckett is a writer whose relevance to his time and use of poetic imagery can be compared to Shakespeare's in the late Renaissance. John Calder has examined the work of Beckett principally for what it has to say about our time in terms of philosophy, theology and ethics, and he points to aspects of his subject's thinking that others have ignored or preferred not to see. Samuel Beckett's acute mind pulled apart with courage and much humour the basic assumptions and beliefs by which most people live. His satire can be biting and his wit devastating. He found no escape from human tragedy in the comforts we build to shield ourselves from reality - even in art, which for most intellectuals has replaced religion. However, he did develop a moral message - one which is in direct contradiction to the values of ambition, success, acquisition and security which is normally held up for admiration, and he looks at the greed, God-worship, and cruelty to others which we increasingly take for granted, in a way that is both unconventional and revolutionary.If this study shocks many readers it is because the honesty, the integrity and the depth of Beckett's thinking - expressed through his novels, plays and poetry, but also through his other writings and correspondence - is itself shocking, to conventional thinking. Yet what he has to say is also comforting. He offers a different ethic and prescription for living - a message based on stoic courage, compassion and an ability to understand and forgive.
Author: Matthew Feldman Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 383826701X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 405
Book Description
This collection of essays, most of which return to or renew something of an empirical or archival approach to the issues, represents the most comprehensive analysis of Beckett's relationship to philosophy in print, how philosophical issues, conundrums, and themes play out amid narrative intricacies. The volume is thus both an astonishingly comprehensive overview and a series of detailed readings of the intersection between philosophical texts and Samuel Beckett's oeuvre, offered by a plurality of voices and bookended by an historical introduction and a thematic conclusion.?S. E. Gontarski, Journal of Beckett StudiesThis is an important contribution to ongoing attempts to understand the relationship of Beckett's work to philosophy. It breaks some new ground, and helps us to consider not only how Beckett made use of philosophy but how his own thought might be understood philosophical.?Anthony Uhlmann, University of Western Sydney
Author: Andrea Oppo Publisher: Peter Lang ISBN: 9783039118243 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
This book examines the role of Samuel Beckett in contemporary philosophical aesthetics, primarily through analysis of both his own essays and the various interpretations that philosophers (especially Adorno, Blanchot, Deleuze, and Badiou) have given to his works. The study centres around the fundamental question of the relationship between art and truth, where art, as a negative truth, comes to its complete exhaustion (as Deleuze terms it) by means of a series of 'endgames' that progressively involve philosophy, writing, language and every individual and minimal form of expression. The major thesis of the book is that, at the heart of Beckett's philosophical project, this 'aesthetics of truth' turns out to be nothing other than the real subject itself, within a contradictory and tragic relationship that ties the Self/Voice to the Object/Body. Yet a number of questions remain open. 'What' or 'who' lies behind this process? What is left of the endgame of art and subjectivity? Finally, what sustains and renders possible Beckett's paradoxical axiom of the 'impossibility to express' alongside the 'obligation to express'? By means of a thorough overview of the most recent criticism of Beckett, this book will try to answer these questions.
Author: Wimbush Andy Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand ISBN: 3838213696 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 292
Book Description
In the 1930s, a young Samuel Beckett confessed to a friend that he had been living his life according to an ‘abject self-referring quietism’. Andy Wimbush argues that ‘quietism’—a philosophical and religious attitude of renunciation and will-lessness—is a key to understanding Beckett’s artistic vision and the development of his career as a fiction writer from his early novels Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Murphy to late short prose texts such as Stirrings Still and Company. Using Beckett’s published and archival material, Still: Samuel Beckett’s Quietism shows how Beckett distilled an understanding of quietism from the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, E.M. Cioran, Thomas à Kempis, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and André Gide, before turning it into an aesthetic that would liberate him from the powerful literary traditions of nineteenth-century realism and early twentieth-century high modernism. Quietism, argues Andy Wimbush, was for Beckett a lifelong preoccupation that shaped his perspectives on art, relationships, ethics, and even notions of salvation. But most of all it showed Beckett a way to renounce authorial power and write from a position of impotence, ignorance, and incoherence so as to produce a new kind of fiction that had, in Molloy’s words, the ‘tranquility of decomposition’.
Author: Garin Dowd Publisher: Rodopi ISBN: 904202206X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
"Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari" is an innovative approach to the relationship of the work of Samuel Beckett to philosophy. The study seeks to combine intertextual analysis and a 'schizoanalytic genealogy' derived from the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to explore a 'becoming-philosophy' of Beckett's literary writing. The author focuses on zones of encounter and confrontation - spaces and times of 'becoming' - between Beckett, selected philosophers and Deleuze and Guattari. In the retrospective glance occasioned by that part of Deleuze and Guattari's complex legacy which embraces their interest in the author, Beckett's writing in particular effectuates a threshold hesitation which can be seen directly to impact on their approach to the history of philosophy and on their contribution to its 'molecularization' in the name of experimentation. "Abstract Machines," with its arresting perspectives on a wide range of Beckett's work, will appeal to academics and postgraduate students interested in the philosophical echoes so evident in his writing. The extent of its recourse to philosophers aside from Deleuze and Guattari, including, notably, Alain Badiou, renders it a timely and provocative intervention in contemporary debates concerning the relationship of literature to philosophy, both within Beckett studies and beyond.
Author: Matthew Feldman Publisher: Ibidem Press ISBN: 9783838207063 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 312
Book Description
The dozen essays brought together here, alongside a newly-written introduction, contextualize and exemplify the recent 'empirical turn' in Beckett studies. Characterized, above all, by recourse to manuscript materials in constructing revisionist interpretations, this approach has helped to transform the study of Samuel Beckett over the past generation. In addition to focusing upon Beckett's early immersion in philosophy and psychology, other chapters similarly analyze his later collaboration with the BBC through the lens of literary history. Falsifying Beckett thus offers new readings of Beckett by returning to his archive of notebooks, letters, and drafts. In reassessing key aspects of his development as one of the 20th century's leading artists, this collection is of interest to all students of Beckett's writing as well as 'historicist' scholars and critics of modernism more generally.
Author: Anthony Uhlmann Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139460803 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 3
Book Description
Beckett often made use of images from the visual arts and readapted them, staging them in his plays, or using them in his fiction. Anthony Uhlmann sets out to explain how an image differs from other terms, like 'metaphor' or 'representation', and, in the process, to analyse Beckett's use of images borrowed from philosophy and aesthetics. This study, first published in 2006, carefully examines Beckett's thoughts on the image in his literary works and his extensive notes to the philosopher Arnold Geulincx. Uhlmann considers how images might allow one kind of interaction between philosophy and literature, and how Beckett makes use of images which are borrowed from, or drawn into dialogue with, philosophical images from Geulincx, Berkeley, Bergson, and the ancient Stoics. Uhlmann's reading of Beckett's aesthetic and philosophical interests provides a revolutionary reading of the importance of the image in his work.
Author: Steven Matthews Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198880952 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 577
Book Description
The Irish writer and Nobel Prize winner, Samuel Beckett, assembled for himself a history of western philosophy during the 1930s, just at the point at which his first novel, Murphy, was coming together. The 'Philosophy Notes', together with related notes taken at that time about St. Augustine, thereafter provided Beckett with a store of knowledge, but also with phrases and images, which he took up in the major work that won him international and enduring fame, from the dramas Waiting for Godot and Endgame, through to the late prose works Worstward Ho and Stirrings Still. This edition presents, for the first time, Beckett's full 'Philosophy Notes', which constitute his most extensive unpublished text. The Notes display Beckett's own interests and emphases within the history of western philosophy, from the pre-Socratic Greeks onwards, together with more familiar figures in the study of his work, such as Descartes, Leibnitz, and Geulincx. Here we see Beckett's original thoughts on all of these figures for the first time. The Notes also, tellingly and often comically, display Beckett's impatience with many aspects of philosophy, such as its anthropological or anthropomorphic bias, or the idealism of the Enlightenment and Kant. The Edition contains an extensive Introduction, outlining the origin of Beckett's Notes, his major sources and approach to them, the historical context for his view of philosophy, and the significance of Beckett's 'Philosophy Notes' within his mature writings. The many footnotes then suggest ways in which particular aspects of the philosophy narrated here by Beckett suggest fresh insights into those later writings—the images, but also the creative impulses, behind some of his most famous texts. This Edition, further, raises larger questions about, and perspectives upon, the relation between philosophy and literature in the twentieth century and beyond.
Author: Anthony Uhlmann Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521640763 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 228
Book Description
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.
Author: Daniel Koczy Publisher: Springer ISBN: 3319956183 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 244
Book Description
This book draws on the theatrical thinking of Samuel Beckett and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to propose a method for research undertaken at the borders of performance and philosophy. Exploring how Beckett fabricates encounters with the impossible and the unthinkable in performance, it asks how philosophy can approach what cannot be thought while honouring and preserving its alterity. Employing its method, it creates a series of encounters between aspects of Beckett’s theatrical practice and a range of concepts drawn from Deleuze’s philosophy. Through the force of these encounters, a new range of concepts is invented. These provide novel ways of thinking affect and the body in performance; the possibility of theatrical automation; and the importance of failure and invention in our attempts to respond to performance encounters. Further, this book includes new approaches to Beckett’s later theatrical work and provides an overview of Deleuze’s conception of philosophical practice as an ongoing struggle to think with immanence.
Author: John Calder
Author: Matthew Feldman
Author: Andrea Oppo
Author: Wimbush Andy
Author: Garin Dowd
Author: Matthew Feldman
Author: Anthony Uhlmann
Author: Steven Matthews
Author: Anthony Uhlmann
Author: Daniel Koczy