Eliot and Beckett's Low Modernism

Eliot and Beckett's Low Modernism
Author: Rick de Villiers
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2021-12-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474479057

<h4>Explores the relation between humility and humiliation in the works of T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett</h4>

<ul><li>Offers the first book-length comparative study of T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett</li>
<li>Develops a literary theory of humility and humiliation – concepts whose definitions have largely been determined by philosophy and theology</li>
<li>Explores the relation between negative affect, ethics and aesthetics</li></ul>

<p>Humility and humiliation have an awkward, often unacknowledged intimacy. Humility may be a queenly, cardinal or monkish virtue, while humiliation points to an affective state at the extreme end of shame. Yet a shared etymology links the words to lowliness and, further down, to the earth. As this study suggests, like the terms in question, T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett share an imperfect likeness. Between them is a common interest in states of abjection, shame and suffering – and possible responses to such states. Tracing the relation between negative affect, ethics, and aesthetics, <i>Eliot and Beckett’s Low Modernism</i> demonstrates how these two major modernists recuperate the affinity between humility and humiliation – concepts whose definitions have largely been determined by philosophy and theology.</p>

The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual

The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual
Author: John D. Morgenstern
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2023-06-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1802074325

The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual is the leading venue for the critical reassessment of Eliot’s life and work in light of the ongoing publication of his letters, critical volumes of his complete prose, the new edition of his complete poems, and the forthcoming critical edition of his plays. All critical approaches are welcome, as are essays pertaining to any aspect of Eliot’s work as a poet, critic, playwright, or editor. John D. Morgenstern, General Editor Editorial Advisory Board: Ronald Bush, University of Oxford David E. Chinitz, Loyola University Chicago Anthony Cuda, University of North Carolina–Greensboro Robert Crawford, University of St Andrews Frances Dickey, University of Missouri John Haffenden, University of Sheffield Benjamin G. Lockerd, Grand Valley State University Gail McDonald, Goldsmiths, University of London Gabrielle McIntire, Queen’s University Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia Christopher Ricks, Boston University Ronald Schuchard, Emory University Vincent Sherry, Washington University at St. Louis

The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature

The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature
Author: Michael Y. Bennett
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 803
Release: 2024-05-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040001610

The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature is the first authoritative and definitive edited collection on absurdist literature. As a field-defining volume, the editor and the contributors are world leaders in this ever-exciting genre that includes some of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century, including Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Albert Camus. Ever puzzling and always refusing to be pinned down, this book does not attempt to define absurdist literature, but attempts to examine its major and minor players. As such, the field is indirectly defined by examining its constituent writers. Not only investigating the so-called “Theatre of the Absurd,” this volume wades deeply into absurdist fiction and absurdist poetry, expanding much of our previous sense of what constitutes absurdist literature. Furthermore, long overdue, approximately one-third of the book is devoted to marginalized writers: black, Latin/x, female, LGBTQ+, and non-Western voices.

Lacan and Psychoanalytic Obsolescence

Lacan and Psychoanalytic Obsolescence
Author: Jean-Michel Rabaté
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2024-09-23
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1040126227

This book explores the importance of Lacan’s role as an irritant within psychoanalysis, and how Freud and Lacan saw that as key to ensuring that psychoanalysis remained fresh and vital rather than becoming obsolescent. Drawing on Freud’s thinking as well as Lacan’s, Rabate examines how Lacan’s unwillingness to allow psychoanalytic thinking to become stale or pigeonholed into one part of life was key in his thinking. By constantly returning to psychoanalytic ideas in new and evolving ways, Lacan kept psychoanalysis moving and changing, much as Socrates did for philosophical thinking in classical Athens. This ‘gadfly’ or irritant role gave him free reign to explore all aspects of psychoanalytic thinking and treatment, and how it can permeate all aspects of life, both in the consulting room and beyond. Drawing on a deep understanding of Lacan’s work as well as Freud’s, this book is key reading for all those seeking to understand why Lacan’s work remains so important and so challenging for contemporary psychoanalysis.

Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Auden, Beckett

Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Auden, Beckett
Author: Adrian Poole
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2013-09-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1441139915

The four writers featured in this volume represent different aspects of the modernist response to Shakespeare. James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and Samuel Beckett were all exceptionally learned and their art takes a delight in difficulty. But the scurrility, irreverence and playfulness they found in Shakespeare are essential features of what they themselves were to do with him. They were particularly drawn to Shakespeare's outcasts, and to the experiences of marginality, estrangement, indigence and craziness. In return they have helped to shape the ways in which we now read Shakespeare himself.

Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination

Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination
Author: Steven Connor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2014-06-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139993119

Steven Connor, one of the most influential critics of twentieth-century literature and culture, has spent much of his career writing and thinking about Samuel Beckett. This book presents Connor's finest published work on Beckett alongside fresh essays that explore how Beckett has shaped major themes in modernism and twentieth-century literature. Through discussions of sport, nausea, slowness, flies, the radio switch, religion and academic life, Connor shows how Beckett's writing is characteristic of a distinctively mundane or worldly modernism, arguing that it is well-attuned to our current concern with the stressed relations between the human and natural worlds. Through Connor's analysis, Beckett's prose, poetry and dramatic works animate a modernism profoundly concerned with life, worldly existence and the idea of the world as such. Lucid, provocative, wide-ranging, and richly informed by critical and cultural theory, this book is required reading for anyone teaching or studying Beckett, modernism and twentieth-century literary studies.

Eliot and Beckett's Low Modernism

Eliot and Beckett's Low Modernism
Author: Rick de Villiers
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2021-11-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474479065

<h4>Explores the relation between humility and humiliation in the works of T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett</h4>

<ul><li>Offers the first book-length comparative study of T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett</li>
<li>Develops a literary theory of humility and humiliation – concepts whose definitions have largely been determined by philosophy and theology</li>
<li>Explores the relation between negative affect, ethics and aesthetics</li></ul>

<p>Humility and humiliation have an awkward, often unacknowledged intimacy. Humility may be a queenly, cardinal or monkish virtue, while humiliation points to an affective state at the extreme end of shame. Yet a shared etymology links the words to lowliness and, further down, to the earth. As this study suggests, like the terms in question, T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett share an imperfect likeness. Between them is a common interest in states of abjection, shame and suffering – and possible responses to such states. Tracing the relation between negative affect, ethics, and aesthetics, <i>Eliot and Beckett’s Low Modernism</i> demonstrates how these two major modernists recuperate the affinity between humility and humiliation – concepts whose definitions have largely been determined by philosophy and theology.</p>

Modernist Life Histories

Modernist Life Histories
Author: Daniel Aureliano Newman
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2018-10-12
Genre:
ISBN: 1474439632

Modernist Life Histories explores how new models of embryonic development helped inspire new kinds of coming-of-age plots during the first half of the twentieth century.

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett
Author: Jennifer Birkett
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2014-06-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 131788583X

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.

Modernism the Lure of Heresy

Modernism the Lure of Heresy
Author: Peter Gay
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 664
Release: 2008
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780393052053

This is a brilliant, provocative long essay on the rise and fall and survival of modernism, by the English-languages' greatest living cultural historian.