Beckett and Authority

Beckett and Authority
Author: Elizabeth Barry
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2006-11-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230627498

This new book situates Beckett in a philosophical and literary tradition that has argued for the creative value of stupidity, a key concept in the thinking of philosophers such as Wittgenstein. It investigates the relationship between verbal cliché, revealing the strategies he used to challenge intellectual and social authority in his works.

Damned to Fame

Damned to Fame
Author: James Knowlson
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 806
Release: 2004
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780802141255

Damned to Fame is the brilliant and insightful portrait of Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett, mysterious and reclusive master of twentieth-century literature. Professor James Knowlson, Beckett's chosen biographer and a leading authority on Beckett, vividly re-creates Beckett's life from his birth in a rural suburb of Dublin in 1906 to his death in Paris in 1989, revealing the real man behind the literary giant. Scrupulously researched and filled with previously unknown information garnered from interviews with the author and his friends, family, and contemporaries, Knowlson's unparalleled work is the definitive Beckett biography of our time.

Torres Strait Islanders

Torres Strait Islanders
Author: Jeremy Beckett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1987
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780521378628

Reactions of the Torres Strait Islanders, Australia's "other" indigenous minority, to colonialism and their position in Australian society, are compared with the Aborigine experience.

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: 110841799X

Beckett's Political Imagination uncovers Beckett's lifelong engagement with political thought and political history, showing how this concern informed his work as fiction author, dramatist, critic and translator. This radically new account will appeal to students, researchers and Beckett lovers alike.

Beckett's Dantes

Beckett's Dantes
Author: Daniela Caselli
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2013-07-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1847796303

Beckett's Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism is the first study in English on the literary relation between Beckett and Dante. It is an innovative reading of Samuel Beckett and Dante's works and a critical engagement with contemporary theories of intertextuality. It is an informative intertextual reading of Beckett's work, detecting previously unknown quotations, allusions to, and parodies of Dante in Beckett's fiction and criticism. The volume interprets Dante in the original Italian (as it appears in Beckett), translating into English all Italian quotations. It benefits from a multilingual approach based on Beckett's published works in English and French, and on manuscripts (which use English, French, German and Italian). Through a close reading of Beckett's fiction and criticism, the book will argue that Dante is both assumed as an external source of literary and cultural authority in Beckett's work, and also participates in Beckett's texts' sceptical undermining of authority. Moreover, the book demonstrates that the many references to various 'Dantes' produce 'Mr Beckett' as the figure of the author responsible for such a remarkably interconnected oeuvre. The book is aimed at the scholarly communities interested in literatures in English, literary and critical theory, comparative literature and theory, French literature and theory and Italian studies. Its jargon-free style will also attract third-year or advanced undergraduate students, and postgraduate students, as well as those readers interested in the unusual relationship between one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and the medieval author who stands for the very idea of the Western canon.

Engagement and Indifference

Engagement and Indifference
Author: Henry Sussman
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2001-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780791447666

Explores the hidden political and ethical dimensions of the work of Samuel Beckett, an author who might otherwise be considered indifferent to such considerations.

Arts of Impoverishment

Arts of Impoverishment
Author: Leo Bersani
Publisher:
Total Pages: 254
Release: 1993
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Why taunt and flout us, as Beckett's writing does? Why discourage us from seeing, as Mark Rothko's paintings often can? Why immobilize and daze us, as Alain Resnais' films sometimes will? Why, Leo Bersnai and Ulysse Dutoit ask, would three acknowledged masters of their media make work deliberately opaque and inhospitable to an audience? This book shows how such crippling moves may signal a profoundly original - and profoundly anti-modernist - renunciation of art's authority.

Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature

Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature
Author: Asja Szafraniec
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780804754576

The late Jacques Derrida’s notion of literature is explored in this new study. Starting with Derrida’s self-professed inability to comment on the work of Samuel Beckett, whom Derrida nevertheless considered one of the most interesting and exemplary writers of our time, Asja Szafraniec argues that the shared feature of literary works as Derrida understands them is a double, juridical-economical gesture, and that one aspect of this notion (the juridical) is more hospitable to Beckett’s oeuvre than the other. She then discusses other contemporary philosophical approaches to Beckett, including those of Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, and Alain Badiou. The book offers an innovative analysis of Derrida’s approach to literature, as well as an overview of current philosophical approaches to contemporary literature, and a number of innovative readings of Beckett’s work.