Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett's Drama
Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett's Drama

Author: Anna McMullan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-07-24

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1000155374

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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the full range of Beckett’s dramatic canon for stage, radio, television and film, including early drama, mimes and unpublished fragments.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.

Say It
Say It

Author: Sarah West

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 9042030798

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Central to Samuel Beckett’s literature is a wilful voice which insists on speaking and being heard. Beckett described it as “a truly exterior voice”, and in the plays he separates voice from the body and turns it into an audible character. Previous critical studies have explored the enigma of this voice, its identity, source and location, but little attention has been given to the voice as protagonist. This volume traces the genesis of the performative voice in the early prose and charts its trajectory throughout the dramatic oeuvre in a readable narrative which generates fresh insights into some of Beckett’s most remarkable and impenetrable plays. It examines the use of embodied and acousmatic – ‘out of body’ – voices in the different media of theatre, radio and television; the treatment of voice in relation to music, image and movement; and the ‘shifting threshold’ between the written and spoken word. The analysis comprises a detailed study of dramatic speech and technical aspects of sound reproduction, making it relevant for all scholars and students with an interest in textual and performance issues in Beckett’s drama.

The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett
The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett

Author: Samuel Beckett

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2012-12-20

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 0571300197

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The present volume gathers all of Beckett's texts for theatre, from 1955 to 1984. It includes both the major dramatic works and the short and more compressed texts for the stage and for radio. 'He believes in the cadence, the comma, the bite of word on reality, whatever else he believes; and his devotion to them, he makes clear, is a sufficient focus for the reader's attention. In the modern history of literature he is a unique moral figure, not a dreamer of rose-gardens but a cultivator of what will grow in the waste land, who can make us see the exhilarating design that thorns and yucca share with whatever will grow anywhere.' - Hugh Kenner Contents: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, All That Fall, Acts Without Words, Krapp's Last Tape, Roughs for the Theatre, Embers, Roughs for the Radio, Words and Music, Cascando, Play, Film, The Old Tune, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Breath, Not I, That Time, Footfalls, Ghost Trio,... but the clouds..., A Piece of Monologue, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, Quad, Catastrophe, Nacht und Traume, What Where.

Endgame and Act Without Words
Endgame and Act Without Words

Author: Samuel Beckett

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2009-06-16

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13: 0802198813

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Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969; his literary output of plays, novels, stories and poetry has earned him an uncontested place as one of the greatest writers of our time. Endgame, originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett himself, is considered by many critics to be his greatest single work. A pinnacle of Beckett’s characteristic raw minimalism, it is a pure and devastating distillation of the human essence in the face of approaching death.

Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett
Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett

Author: Katherine H. Burkman

Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 9780838632994

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All of the essays in this collection reflect a sense that Beckett's power as a playwright derives largely from a mythic vision that informs his drama. Their approaches to the definition and use of myth and ritual in his plays vary considerably, however, ranging from the Jungian to the Marxian to the Lacanian, and drawing on the theories of Campbell, Freud, Eliade, Frye, Turner, Girard, Baudrillard, and others.

Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama
Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama

Author: Mary Bryden

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 1993-07-19

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780333573068

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Beckett's early writing is structured upon very sharply defined gender polarities. Objects of alarm, lust, derision, or indifference, women incarnate the 'Other', Beckett's shift from fiction to stage and media drama - giving a voice to women - unsettles this adversarial structure. In the later prose and drama, gender qualifies Beckett's people for neither fear nor favour. Mary Bryden's analysis, embraces not only Beckett's published prose and drama, but also a number of unpublished and draft manuscripts from Reading University's Beckett Archive.