<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>
Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature addresses the relevance of terror to understanding the violence, the suffering, and the pain experienced by the narrative voices of Beckett's major post-1945 works in prose: The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing, How It Is, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho. Through a sustained dialogue with the theoretical work of Maurice Blanchot, it accomplishes a systematic interrogation of what happens in the space of literature when writing, and first of all Beckett's, encounters the language of terror, thereby giving new significance - ethical, ontological, and political - to what speaks in Beckett's texts.a a
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.
<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>
Creative Involution: Bergson, Beckett Deleuze focuses on a philosophical trajectory that not only had a profound impact on critical thought of the 20th and now 21st centuries, but on cosmopolitan, contemporary culture more broadly and on artistic experiment and expression in particular.
This book maps out the novel's complex network of intertexts, sources and echoes, interprets its highly experimental writing and explains the work's great significance for twentieth-century literature. It offers a clear pathway into this remarkable bilingual novel, identifying Beckettâ (TM)s use of previously unknown sources in the history of Western philosophy, from the ancient and modern periods, and challenging critical orthodoxies. Through careful archival scholarship and attention to the dynamics of self-translation, the book traces Beckettâ (TM)s transformation of his narratorâ (TM)s â ~ancient voiceâ (TM), his intellectual heritage, into a mode of aesthetic representation that offers the means to think beyond intractable paradoxes of philosophy. This shift in the workâ (TM)s relation to tradition marks a hiatus in literary modernism, a watershed moment whose deep and enduring significance may now be appreciated.
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.
Reconsiders the lyrical norm that predominates in Anglophone accounts of poetry through a multilingual and transnational lensA bold project that departs from a tradition heavily dominated by the lyric to question the very nature of what counts as poetry.A visually exciting text that draws on poetry and art from a wide array of late twentieth and early twenty-first century practitioners.An interdisciplinary approach to poetry and poetics that opens new avenues for understanding how poetry intersects with philosophies of the object, media theory, and visual studies.A transnational frame that responds to a growing scholarly push to situate American studies within the broader context of the American hemisphere.This book examines poets and artists in the Americas during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to show how they worked to make language into material objects and material objects into language. It builds a theory of 'material poetics' that provides an alternative account of poetry in hemispheric America. Rebecca Kosick argues that by reframing American poetry to prominently include object-oriented practices within and beyond the United States, material poetry can be seen as representing a significant branch of the American poetic tradition.