Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett's Drama

Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett's Drama
Author: Anna McMullan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2020-07-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000155374

The representation and experience of embodiment is a central preoccupation of Samuel Beckett’s drama, one that he explored through diverse media. McMullan investigates the full range of Beckett’s dramatic canon for stage, radio, television and film, including early drama, mimes and unpublished fragments. She examines how Beckett’s drama composes and recomposes the body in each medium, and provokes ways of perceiving, conceiving and experiencing embodiment that address wider preoccupations with corporeality, technology and systems of power. McMullan argues that the body in Beckett’s drama reveals a radical vulnerability of the flesh, questioning corporeal norms based on perfectible, autonomous or invulnerable bodies, but is also the site of a continual reworking of the self, and of the boundaries between self and other. Beckett’s re-imagining of the body presents embodiment as a collaborative performance between past and present, flesh and imagination, self and other, including the spectator / listener.

The Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett

The Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett
Author: Charles A. Carpenter
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 525
Release: 2011-10-13
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 144117852X

A selectively comprehensive bibliography of the vast literature about Samuel Beckett's dramatic works, arranged for the efficient and convenient use of scholars on all levels.

Transdisciplinary Beckett

Transdisciplinary Beckett
Author: Lucy Jeffery
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2021-11-16
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3838215842

This is the first monograph to analyse Beckett’s use of the visual arts, music, and broadcasting media through a transdisciplinary approach. It considers how Beckett’s complex and varied use of art, music, and media in a selection of his novels, radio plays, teleplays, and later short prose informs his creative process. Investigating specific instances where Beckett’s writing adopts musical or visual structures, Lucy Jeffery identifies instances of Beckett’s transdisciplinarity and considers how this approach to writing facilitates ways of expressing familiar Beckettian themes of abstraction, ambiguity, longing, and endlessness. With case studies spanning forty years, she evaluates Beckett’s stylistic shifts in relation to the cultural context, particularly the technological advancements and artistic movements, during which they were written. With new examples from Beckett’s notebooks, critical essays, and letters, Transdisciplinary Beckett evidences how the drastic changes that took place in the visual arts and in musical composition influenced Beckett and, in turn, were influenced by him. Transdisciplinary Beckett situates Beckett as a key figure not just in the literary marketplace but also in the fields of music, art, and broadcasting.

Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance

Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance
Author: Hannah Simpson
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2022-08-20
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 303104133X

Beckett’s plays have attracted a striking range of disability performances – that is, performances that cast disabled actors, regardless of whether their roles are explicitly described as ‘disabled’ in the text. Grounded in the history of disability performance of Beckett’s work and a new theorising of Beckett’s treatment of the impaired body, Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance examines four contemporary disability performances of Beckett’s plays, staged in the UK and US, and brings the rich fields of Beckett studies and disability studies into mutually illuminating conversation. Pairing original interviews with the actors and directors involved in these productions alongside critical analysis underpinned by recent disability and performance theory, this book explores how these productions emphasise or rework previously undetected indicators of disability in Beckett’s work. More broadly, it reveals how Beckett’s theatre compulsively interrogates alternative embodiments, unexpected forms of agency, and the extraordinary social interdependency of the human body.

Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature

Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature
Author: Jacob L. Bender
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2020-09-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030509397

This comparative literature study explores how writers from across Ireland and Latin America have, both in parallel and in concert, deployed symbolic representations of the dead in their various anti-colonial projects. In contrast to the ghosts and revenants that haunt English and Anglo-American letters—where they are largely either monstrous horrors or illusory frauds—the dead in these Irish/Latinx archives can serve as potential allies, repositories of historical grievances, recorders of silenced voices, and disruptors of neocolonial discourse.

The Plays of Samuel Beckett

The Plays of Samuel Beckett
Author: Katherine Weiss
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2013-01-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1408157306

The Plays of Samuel Beckett provides a stimulating analysis of Beckett's entire dramatic oeuvre, encompassing his stage, radio and television plays. Ideal for students, this major study combines analysis of each play by Katherine Weiss with interveiws and essays from practitioners and scholars.

Beckett's Thing

Beckett's Thing
Author: David Lloyd
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2016-09-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474415733

Beckett was deeply engaged with the visual arts and individual painters, including Jack B. Yeats, Bram van Velde, and Avigdor Arikha. In this monograph, David Lloyd explores what Beckett saw in their paintings. He explains what visual resources Beckett found in these particular painters rather than in the surrealism of Masson or the abstraction of Kandinsky or Mondrian. The analysis of Beckett's visual imagination is based on his criticism and on close analysis of the paintings he viewed. Lloyd shows how Beckett's fascination with these painters illuminates the 'painterly' qualities of his theatre and the philosophical, political and aesthetic implications of Beckett's highly visual dramatic work.

Beckett’s Voices / Voicing Beckett

Beckett’s Voices / Voicing Beckett
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2021-08-16
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9004468382

Beckett’s Voices / Voicing Beckett uses ‘voice’ as a prism to investigate Samuel Beckett’s work across a range of texts, genres, and cultures. Twenty-one international contributors evaluate Beckett’s contemporary artistic legacy in relation to music, media, performance, and philosophy.

Samuel Beckett’s Endgame

Samuel Beckett’s Endgame
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2007-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9401205043

This collection of essays – the first volume in the Dialogue series – brings together new and experienced scholars to present innovative critical approaches to Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame. These essays broach a broad range of topics, many of which are inherently controversial and have generated significant levels of debate in the past. Critical readings of the play in relation to music, metaphysics, intertextuality, and time are counterpointed by essays that consider the nature of performance, the history of the theater and the music hall, Beckett’s attitudes to directing his play, and his responses to other directors. This collection will be of special interest to Beckett scholars, to students of literature and drama, and to drama theorists and practitioners.

Samuel Beckett's Plays on Film and Television

Samuel Beckett's Plays on Film and Television
Author: G. Herren
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2016-04-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137109084

This is the first book devoted Beckett's innovative work for the big- and small-screens. Herren examines each of Beckett's film and television plays in depth, emphasizing the central role that memory plays in these haunting works.