We find in Beckett's masterful, exquisite prose, the familiar themes from his earlier works here expressed in the anguished murmurings of the solitary human consciousness.
We find in Beckett's masterful, exquisite prose, the familiar themes from his earlier works here expressed in the anguished murmurings of the solitary human consciousness.
Collects over twenty short plays published by the Nobel Prize winning playwright Samuel Beckett. Includes his mimes, radio and television plays, screenplay, and adaptations of other's works.
Samuel Beckett is unique in literature. Born and educated in Ireland, he lived most of his life in Paris. His literary output was rendered in either English or French, and he often translated one to the other, but there is disagreement about the contents of his bilingual corpus. A Beckett Canon by renowned theater scholar Ruby Cohn offers an invaluable guide to the entire corpus, commenting on Beckett's work in its original language. Beginning in 1929 with Beckett's earliest work, the book examines the variety of genres in which he worked: poems, short stories, novels, plays, radio pieces, teleplays, reviews, and criticism. Cohn grapples with the difficulties in Beckett's work, including the opaque erudition of the early English verse and fiction, and the searching depths and syntactical ellipsis of the late works. Specialist and nonspecialist readers will find A Beckett Canon valuable for its remarkable inclusiveness. Cohn has examined the holdings of all of the major Beckett depositories, and is thus able to highlight neglected manuscripts and correct occasional errors in their listings. Intended as a resource to accompany the reading of Beckett's writing--in English or French, published or unpublished, in part or as a whole--the book offers context, information, and interpretation of the work of one of the last century's most important writers. Ruby Cohn is Professor Emerita of Comparative Drama, University of California, Davis. She is author or editor of many books, including Anglo-American Interplay in Recent Drama; Retreats from Realism in Recent English Drama; From Desire to Godot; and Just Play: Beckett's Theater.
Provides a comprehensive exploration of Beckett's historical, cultural and philosophical contexts, offering new critical insights for scholars and general readers.
The author defines and analyzes the new type of theatricalperspective invented by Samuel Beckett. She begins with an overview of thechanges of the definition of twentieth century-knowledge (e.g, art, science,philosophy, and psychology) then discusses the concepts of time, space, andmovement which underlie Beckett's notion and use of perspective in the theater.The Broken Window shows how Beckett translates a number of twentieth-centuryesthetic and philosophical concerns - the impossibility of separating subjectand object, the indeterminacy of time and space, the inevitability of movementand change - into specific dramatic techniques and traces their evolutionthrough close textual analyses of six plays. Hale is the first critic to define Beckett's theatricaltechniques in terms of the notion of perspective and to link them to similarinnovations in the plastic arts. In addition, no critic has so exhaustivelyelaborated Beckett's premises of indeterminacy, the inevitability ofperception, and the breakdown of the subject/object relationship.
Beyond Minimalism explores Beckett's drama of the '70s and '80s, examining the ways in which play text and performance merge through the playwright's poetic idiom. Beginning with Not I and continuing through Catastrophe and What Where, Brater examines the plays not only as texts but also as theater pieces. Discussing the technical and aesthetic demands that productions like Footfalls and Rockaby make on actor, director, and spectator, Brater clarifies the essential relationship between Beckett's achievement in the context of the breakdown of genre, performance poetry, and the electronic intrusion of the recorded voice as a new theatrical convention. In the course of his analysis Brater demonstrates how Beckett's late style in the theater both continues and clarifies the dramatic lyricism that is the hallmark of earlier works such as Endgame and Waiting for Godot.
This collection of 75 solo speeches and performance pieces for actors has been selected from the finest material being written today for theatre in America and England. Solo! presents dramatic monologues on the cutting edge. All selections include acting notes along with the quick and easy guide to the art of auditioning.
In contrast to the many critics who consider W. B. Yeats a dominant influence on Beckett's drama, this study demonstrates that the two are almost diametrically opposed in their theater and that the real bridge to Beckett's art is to be found in the narrative and pictorial creations of the younger Yeats brother, Jack.