Beckett and Aesthetics, first published in 2003, examines Samuel Beckett's struggle with the recalcitrance of artistic media, their refusal to yield to his artistic purposes. As a young man Beckett hoped that writing could provide psychic authenticity and true representation of the physical world; instead he found himself immersed in artificialities and self-enclosed word games. Daniel Albright argues that Beckett escaped from this bind through allegories of artistic frustration and through an art of non-representation, estrangement and general failure. He arrived, Albright shows, at some grasp of fact through the most indirect route available. Albright explores Beckett's experimentation with the notion that an artistic medium might itself be made to speak. This powerful and highly original book explores Beckett's own engagement with radio, film, and television, prose and drama as part of an attempt to escape the confines of the aesthetic. Albright's Beckett becomes a sophisticated theorist of the very notion of the aesthetic.

This book examines the role of Samuel Beckett in contemporary philosophical aesthetics, primarily through analysis of both his own essays and the various interpretations that philosophers (especially Adorno, Blanchot, Deleuze, and Badiou) have given to his works. The study centres around the fundamental question of the relationship between art and truth, where art, as a negative truth, comes to its complete exhaustion (as Deleuze terms it) by means of a series of 'endgames' that progressively involve philosophy, writing, language and every individual and minimal form of expression. The major thesis of the book is that, at the heart of Beckett's philosophical project, this 'aesthetics of truth' turns out to be nothing other than the real subject itself, within a contradictory and tragic relationship that ties the Self/Voice to the Object/Body. Yet a number of questions remain open. 'What' or 'who' lies behind this process? What is left of the endgame of art and subjectivity? Finally, what sustains and renders possible Beckett's paradoxical axiom of the 'impossibility to express' alongside the 'obligation to express'? By means of a thorough overview of the most recent criticism of Beckett, this book will try to answer these questions.

Although Beckett scholarship has in recent decades experienced a renaissance as a result of various poststructuralist approaches that tend to emphasize destabilization and inexpressibility as the defining features of Beckett’s output, relatively little attention has been paid to the ethical aspects of his aesthetics of failure. This book fits into that renaissance, but draws on a distinct, though rarely addressed, connection that Samuel Beckett’s work shares with that of Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas. It is within this philosophical context that the significance of Beckett’s aesthetics of failure becomes most visible. Beckett’s work can be described as one of gradual reduction and disintegration of language, a stripping away of the tools rendering expression at all possible for the sake of approaching the inexpressible. Traditional representation yields to silence and linguistic aporia; language yields to images of absence and emptiness. The primary purpose of this study is to trace this movement of ‘unwording’ and analyze the role inexpressibility plays in Beckett’s prose in its visual, linguistic and ethical manifestations, as the aesthetics of inexpressibility is intrinsically bound with the ethical responsibility of literature understood as maintaining a relation with alterity.

This book places sex and sexuality firmly at the heart of Beckett. From the earliest prose to the late plays, Paul Stewart uncovers a profound mistrust of procreation which nevertheless allows for a surprising variety of non-reproductive forms of sex which challenge established notions of sexual propriety and identity politics.

This collection presents articles that examine Joyce and Beckett’s mutual interest in and use of the negative for artistic purposes. The essays range from philological to psychoanalytic approaches to the literature, and they examine writing from all stages of the authors’ careers. The essays do not seek a direct comparison of author to author; rather they lay out the intellectual and philosophical foundations of their work, and are of interest to the beginning student as well as to the specialist.

This book outlines Beckett's passion for the visual arts as he developed his signature style between the 1930s and 1970s.

Exploring Beckett's relationship with the visual arts and its influence on his creative expression

Gustave Flaubert, Samuel Beckett and Marie NDiaye can be considered as visionaries of a peculiarly radical form of failure, their protagonists and texts alike sliding inexorably into unmanageable states of paradox, incompletion and disintegration. What are the implications of these authors’ experiments in splitting and negativity, experiments which seem to indulge the most cynical aspects of nihilism, whilst at the same time grappling with the very foundations of politicized and psychic truth? In this unusual edited volume of comparative analyses, Andrew Asibong and Aude Campmas bring together ten provocative and illuminating essays, each of which approaches the various ‘failures’ of the bizarre trio of canonical francophone writers along three principal axes of investigation: the aesthetic, the emotional and the political.

Using the work of W.Bion and D.Winnicott, this book offers a psychoanalytic study of Beckett's aesthetics of absence. Focusing on the first prose trilogy and Waiting for Godot, it offers a critical challenge to accepted viewpoints of Beckett's negative status, not only within psychoanalytic literary criticism, but within Beckett criticism at large.

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.