Beckett and Religion
Author: Marius Buning
Publisher: Rodopi
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 340
ISBN-13: 9789042013940
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Theology of Samuel Beckett
Author: John Calder
Publisher: Alma Books
Published: 2018-01-01
Total Pages: 129
ISBN-13: 0714545554
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLike all the greatest writers, Samuel Beckett was primarily interested in discovering the meaning and purpose of life and of the world into which we are born. Knowledgeable about the religion his family and education instilled in him, which as an adult he could neither accept nor reject, he used it extensively in his novels, plays and poetry. Beckett's works also explored philosophy and the imaginative world of Dante and Milton, as well as the theories of Darwin and scientific speculation, in order to create a literature that investigates human destiny more deeply and originally than any other writer had done before.In this, his second book about the essence and depth of Samuel Beckett's thinking and literary art, John Calder analyses the dualism of Beckett's theological writing, his debt to the Gnostics, Manichaeism and Geulincx in particular, the presence of ghosts in his work, and why his late writing has received so little attention compared to the early and middle periods. It will open up the much underestimated Beckett to deeper understanding and provide enjoyment to the many who have become convinced that this once derided author is one of the major literary figures of his time.
Still: Samuel Beckett's Quietism
Author: Wimbush Andy
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Published: 2020-06-18
Total Pages: 292
ISBN-13: 3838213696
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the 1930s, a young Samuel Beckett confessed to a friend that he had been living his life according to an ‘abject self-referring quietism’. Andy Wimbush argues that ‘quietism’—a philosophical and religious attitude of renunciation and will-lessness—is a key to understanding Beckett’s artistic vision and the development of his career as a fiction writer from his early novels Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Murphy to late short prose texts such as Stirrings Still and Company. Using Beckett’s published and archival material, Still: Samuel Beckett’s Quietism shows how Beckett distilled an understanding of quietism from the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, E.M. Cioran, Thomas à Kempis, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and André Gide, before turning it into an aesthetic that would liberate him from the powerful literary traditions of nineteenth-century realism and early twentieth-century high modernism. Quietism, argues Andy Wimbush, was for Beckett a lifelong preoccupation that shaped his perspectives on art, relationships, ethics, and even notions of salvation. But most of all it showed Beckett a way to renounce authorial power and write from a position of impotence, ignorance, and incoherence so as to produce a new kind of fiction that had, in Molloy’s words, the ‘tranquility of decomposition’.
Samuel Beckett and the Question of God in Waiting for Godot
Author: Patricia Patkovszky
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Published: 2009-01-30
Total Pages: 38
ISBN-13: 3640256247
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSeminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, Humboldt-University of Berlin (Department of English and American Studies), course: 20th - Century Drama, 12 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: On 5 January 1953 'Waiting for Godot' challenged its first theaters audience with a never seen dramatic work of art, radically different from anything shown before, the title "referring ironically to the nonappearance of the person awaited so faithfully by the two main protagonists". Before Beckett, drama was synonymous with action: a plot in which barely anything happens was inconceivable. Beckett is the first dramatist to focus exclusively on the act of waiting and to make this into his dominant metaphor for existence. He, at he same time, expects his audience to share that experience of waiting with Estragon and Vladimir. As Martin Esslin pointed out in 1961: "Beckett is trying to capture the basic experience of being 'in the world', having been thrust into it without a by-your-leave, and having, somehow, to come to terms with 'being there', 'Dasein' itself, in Heidegger's sense". Vladimir and Estragon, two tramps, are the main characters of the play. They perform on an empty stage, marked only by a single tree and a low mound, waiting for the appearance of a mysterious character named Godot. Two other men, Pozzo and Lucky, master and servant, turn up and stay with them for a while. To pass their time, they discuss their bodily handicaps, their non-fitting clothes and episodes of their life together as well as questions of theology. Godot, however, never comes; but a boy delivers the message, that he will be there the next day. Vladimir and Estragon consider leaving and even committing suicide, but they fail in doing so. Nearly the same events take place during the second act. Godot never comes and the story kind of repeats itself. Since the first performance of the play people
Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God
Author: Mary Bryden
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 1998
Total Pages: 204
ISBN-13: 9780312212858
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn analysis of the recurrent references to theology and spirituality within the writing of Samuel Beckett.
Christ's Wait for Godot
Author: Stephen D. Morrison
Publisher: Beloved Publishing LLC
Published: 2021-02-23
Total Pages: 144
ISBN-13: 9781631741791
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOften bleak and blasphemous, Samuel Beckett's writing is not commonly considered a source of spiritual courage and theological depth, but "Christ's Wait for Godot" finds much to admire in Beckett's grey world. Stephen D. Morrison leverages his expertise in Jürgen Moltmann's theology to read Beckett with a theologian's eye and discover many surprising parallels. By also gleaning from the insights of Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the mystical and apophatic traditions, Morrison arrives at a highly original reading of Beckett that is at once comforting and challenging. Most critics studying Beckett's religious themes fail to reckon with the strength of his spiritual sensibilities. But there is tremendous metaphysical depth to Beckett's obsession with suffering, protest, longing, and hope. Morrison strives to uncover new ways of reading Beckett's work by taking his spiritual sensibilities seriously and reading him theologically. The result is a book at once hopeful and honest. In the end, it is Beckett's humanity that impresses us the most. And in these uncertain times, we need writers who courageously wrestle with God, truth, and meaning.
Mastering Monday
Author: John D. Beckett
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2009-09-20
Total Pages: 207
ISBN-13: 0830876324
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMany business books point to certain values or habits to be practiced and cultivated. But we need more than abstract principles to guide us in the pursuit of good business. More significantly, we need a genuine experience of the dynamic presence of God at work in our work. Businessman and CEO John Beckett calls us to the transformation of the workplace into a place where the kingdom of God is experienced. Through sharing his own story, as well as looking to biblical and modern-day examples, Beckett offers role models that serve as companions on the journey to faithful and fruitful work. Drawing on a lifetime of wisdom and business acumen, Beckett invites us to enter into the privilege of working in active partnership with God himself. Join the international movement of those whose faith is transforming their work. Master your Mondays by bringing them under the realm of the Master.
A Change of Affection
Author: Becket Cook
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2019-07-30
Total Pages: 224
ISBN-13: 1400212340
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe powerful, dramatic story of how a successful Hollywood set designer whose identity was deeply rooted in his homosexuality came to be suddenly and utterly transformed by the power of the gospel. When Becket Cook moved from Dallas to Los Angeles after college, he discovered a socially progressive, liberal town that embraced not only his creative side but also his homosexuality. He devoted his time to growing his career as a successful set designer and to finding "the one" man who would fill his heart. As a gay man in the entertainment industry, Cook centered his life around celebrity-filled Hollywood parties and traveled to society hot-spots around the world--until a chance encounter with a pastor at an LA coffee shop one morning changed everything. In A Change of Affection, Becket Cook shares his testimony as someone who was transformed by the power of the gospel. Cook's dramatic conversion to Christianity and subsequent seminary training inform his views on homosexuality--personally, biblically, theologically, and culturally--and in his new book he educates Christians on how to better understand this complex and controversial issue while revealing how to lovingly engage with those who disagree. A Change of Affection is a timely and indispensable resource for anyone who desires to understand more fully one of the most common and difficult stumbling blocks to faithfully following Christ today.
Samuel Beckett's Real Silence
Author: Helene Louise Baldwin
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Published: 1981
Total Pages: 188
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExploring the Christian symbolism throughout a major portion of Beckett's mature work (particularly Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Watt, Not I, The Lost Ones, and Waiting for Godot), this book argues that Beckett is a writer of deep religious concern, not in the orthodox sense but in a sense fully as time honored. The path to "direct experience of Absolute of Unconditional Being" is traced through the classic stages of the quest (detachment, darkness, silence, trance, illumination, and revelation) with examples from both the content and structure of the works. A final chapter distinguishes among the several ironic tones that Beckett employs to reveal the profound reverence that is so often misread as cynicism. It is fitting that an author so frequently discussed in religious terms (his 1969 Nobel award cited him for singing the dies irae of the human race) should finally be read as a religious writer. Samuel Beckett's writing, with its rich, dark ambiguity, has been widely acknowledged for its brilliance, but variously interpreted in its meaning. Nearly all critics recognize the religious allusions and symbols present throughout the Beckettian oeuvre, but few have attempted to come to terms with them, preferring to regard these recurring themes and images as atheistic irony. This book addresses that deficiency by arguing that Beckett's major works "may be seen as a cumulative metaphor for the mystic quest," specifically the "negative way" of renunciation that stands in contrast to the affirmative orthodoxy of T.S. Eliot, for example. Dr. Baldwin accomplishes this task by citing the many echoes within Beckett's prose of the great Christian mystics of history--Augustine, Pascal, Langland, Dante--many of whom are clearly the sources drawn upon in Beckett's non-stop allusiveness, and by demonstrating Beckett's parallels with modern Christian mystics, especially Simone Weil , whose themes in Waiting for God are hauntingly evoked in Waiting for Godot and much of the rest of the Beckettian canon.
Is Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" a criticism of Christianity?
Author: Johannes Viertel
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Published: 2019-07-10
Total Pages: 17
ISBN-13: 3668978158
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEssay from the year 2015 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,7, University of Hildesheim (Institut für englische Sprache und Literatur), course: Literature - From Modernism to Postmodernism, language: English, abstract: In this essay care is taken specifically to the role and the criticism of Christianity. Since many studies came to the conclusion that the piece deals mainly with the topic of Christianity, with large influxes of philosophy and existential questions, a broad range of theories and conjectures has developed in this regard. In the course of this work I will first give a general overview of the most important references and criticisms of Christianity, oriented to the text, will then have a closer look at the role of Pozzo and Lucky and will present my conclusion at the end. The play “Waiting for Godot” premiered 1953 and was written by the Irish novelist Samuel Beckett. It is divided into two acts and the main characters, two old men called Vladimir and Estragon, wait on a lonely country road for a man called Mr. Godot. While waiting they are talking, one could say speculate, about that person, contemplate suicide several times, talk about religion and meet several characters but neither of these is Mr. Godot. This was just a very simple representation of events, another response of what happens might be “it depends what you mean by “happen””. In the fifty years since the plays publication many authors have tried to determine the meaning of this play. It seems like there is no specific meaning behind the text and that a new meaning is created each time the text is read. Therefor the text invites the reader to search for an interpretation, a meaning, a sense or message, even though it is not immediately visible. One thus has to accept that there is no right or wrong, only an assumption. With this knowledge it is possible to examine the text at various levels, such as political, religious, biographical, psychoanalytical or even existential.
