Beckett's Laboratory
Beckett's Laboratory

Author: Corey Wakeling

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-04-22

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1350153133

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Offering fresh studies of Samuel Beckett in pre-production, in rehearsal, as an innovator of the script form, and as a speculative director and designer, Beckett's Laboratory reconsiders Beckett's stringent approach to stage direction through the lens of the laboratory and reveals his experimentalism with stage representation and composition. Wakeling argues that acknowledging Beckett's experimental processes, from their composition to their reception, is crucial to understanding the innovative representations of humanity that emerged at different stages in Beckett's practice. Repositioning Beckett's performance oeuvre in relation to philosophy, Wakeling draws upon post-dramatic, symbolist, materialist and post-structural understandings of theatre performance to reappraise Beckett's plays as a composition for performance. The philosophical underpinnings of Beckett's practices are explored through an eclectic mix of familiar and unexplored contemporary theatre productions and films of Beckett's works, including Not I, Nacht und Träume, Happy Days, Footfalls and Catastrophe. Beckett's Laboratory is a provocative examination of Beckett's experimentalism with the human spectacle and his playful reliance upon the interpretative powers of the actors and audience.

Experimental Beckett
Experimental Beckett

Author: Nicholas E. Johnson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-04-30

Total Pages: 75

ISBN-13: 9781108737791

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How do twenty-first century theatre practitioners negotiate the dynamics of tradition and innovation across the works of Samuel Beckett? Beckett's own tendencies toward fluidity of genre, iteration/repetition, and collaboration - modes that also define the 'experimental' - allow for greater openness than is often assumed. Reading recent performances for creative uses of embodiment, environment, and technology reveals the increasingly interdisciplinary, international, and intermedial character of contemporary Beckettian practice. The experimentation of current practitioners challenges a discourse based on historical controversies, exposing a still-expanding terrain for Beckett in performance.

Samuel Beckett and Experimental Psychology
Samuel Beckett and Experimental Psychology

Author: Joshua Powell

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Published: 2020-01-23

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1350091723

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Samuel Beckett's private writings and public work show his deep interest in the workings of the human mind. Samuel Beckett and Psychology is an innovative study of the author's engagement with key concepts in early experimental psychology and rapidly developing scientific ideas about perception, attention and mental imagery. Through innovative new readings of Beckett's later dramatic and prose works, the book reveals the links between his aesthetic method and the methodologies of experimental psychology through the 20th century. Covering important later works including Happy Days, Not I and Footfalls, Samuel Beckett and Psychology sheds important new light on Beckett's depictions of the workings of the embodied mind.

Beckett's afterlives
Beckett's afterlives

Author: Jonathan Bignell

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2023-02-21

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1526153785

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Despite the steady rise in adaptations of Samuel Beckett’s work across the world following the author’s death in 1989, Beckett’s afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to this creative phenomenon. The collection employs interrelated concepts of adaptation, remediation and appropriation to reflect on Beckett’s own evolving approach to crossing genre boundaries and to analyse the ways in which contemporary artists across different media and diverse cultural contexts – including the UK, Europe, the USA and Latin America – continue to engage with Beckett. The book offers fresh insights into how his work has kept inspiring both practitioners and audiences in the twenty-first century, operating through methodologies and approaches that aim to facilitate and establish the study of modern-day adaptations, not just of Beckett but other (multimedia) authors as well.

Beckett's Words
Beckett's Words

Author: David Kleinberg-Levin

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-07-30

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1474216889

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At stake in this book is a struggle with language in a time when our old faith in the redeeming of the word-and the word's power to redeem-has almost been destroyed. Drawing on Benjamin's political theology, his interpretation of the German Baroque mourning play, and Adorno's critical aesthetic theory, but also on the thought of poets and many other philosophers, especially Hegel's phenomenology of spirit, Nietzsche's analysis of nihilism, and Derrida's writings on language, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, because of its communicative and revelatory powers, language bears the utopian "promise of happiness," the idea of a secular redemption of humanity, at the very heart of which must be the achievement of universal justice. In an original reading of Beckett's plays, novels and short stories, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, despite inheriting a language damaged, corrupted and commodified, Beckett redeems dead or dying words and wrests from this language new possibilities for the expression of meaning. Without denying Beckett's nihilism, his picture of a radically disenchanted world, Kleinberg-Levin calls attention to moments when his words suddenly ignite and break free of their despair and pain, taking shape in the beauty of an austere yet joyous lyricism, suggesting that, after all, meaning is still possible.

Beckett's Intermedial Ecosystems
Beckett's Intermedial Ecosystems

Author: Anna McMullan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-02-18

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13: 1108963242

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This Element draws on the concept of ecosystems to investigate selected Beckett works across different media which present worlds where the human does not occupy a privileged place in the order of creation: rather Beckett's human figures are trapped in a regulated system in which they have little agency. Readers, listeners or viewers are complicit in the operation of techniques of observation inherent to the system, but also reminded of the vulnerability of those subjected to it. Beckett's work offers new paradigms and practices which reposition the human in relation to space, time and species.

Experimental Beckett
Experimental Beckett

Author: Nicholas E. Johnson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-04-30

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 1108854966

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How do twenty-first century theatre practitioners negotiate the dynamics of tradition and innovation across the works of Samuel Beckett? Beckett's own tendencies toward fluidity of genre, iteration/repetition, and collaboration – modes that also define the 'experimental' – allow for greater openness than is often assumed. Reading recent performances for creative uses of embodiment, environment, and technology reveals the increasingly interdisciplinary, international, and intermedial character of contemporary Beckettian practice. The experimentation of current practitioners challenges a discourse based on historical controversies, exposing a still-expanding terrain for Beckett in performance.

Beckett's Creatures
Beckett's Creatures

Author: Joseph Anderton

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-05-05

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1474234542

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In the shadow of the Holocaust, Samuel Beckett captures humanity in ruins through his debased beings and a decomposing mode of writing that strives to 'fail better'. But what might it mean to be a 'creature' or 'creaturely' in Beckett's world? In the first full-length study of the concept of the creature in Beckett's prose and drama, this book traces the suspended lives and melancholic existences of Beckett's ignorant and impotent creatures to assess the extent to which political value marks the divide between human and inhuman. Through close readings of Beckett's prose and drama, particularly texts from the middle period, including Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Anderton explicates four arenas of creaturely life in Beckett. Each chapter attends to a particular theme – testimony, power, humour and survival – to analyse a range of pressures and impositions that precipitate the creaturely state of suspension. Drawing on the writings of Adorno, Agamben, Benjamin, Deleuze and Derrida to explore the overlaps between artistic and political structures of creation, the creature emerges as an in-between figure that bespeaks the provisional nature of the human. The result is a provocative examination of the indirect relationship between art and history through Beckett's treatment of testimony, power, humour and survival, which each attest to the destabilisation of meaning after Auschwitz.

Samuel Beckett’s Italian Modernisms
Samuel Beckett’s Italian Modernisms

Author: Michela Bariselli

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-12-03

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1040260098

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In the wake of both Joycean and Dantean celebrations, this volume aims to investigate the fecund influence of Italian culture on Samuel Beckett’s work, with a specific focus on the twentieth century. Located at the intersection of historical avant-garde movements and a renewed interest in tradition, Italian modernism reimagined Italy and its culture, projecting it beyond the shadow of fascism. Following in Joyce’s footsteps, Samuel Beckett soon became an attentive reader of Italian modernist authors. These had a profound effect on his early work, shaping his artistic identity. The influence of his early readings found its way also into Beckett’s postwar writing and, most poignantly, in his theatre. The contributions in this collection rekindle the debate around Beckett as modernist author through the lenses of Italian culture. This study will be of particular interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies, Italian studies, English studies, and comparative literature.