This book contains the English and French texts and a complete record of the genesis of each. Besides Comment C'est How It Is, O'Reilly has included L'Image and an excerpt from Comment C'est that was published later in another volume.

In 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’.

This book contains the English and French texts and a complete record of the genesis of each. Besides Comment C'est How It Is, O'Reilly has included L'Image and an excerpt from Comment C'est that was published later in another volume.

ISBN 9042003375 (paperback) NLG 55.00 From the contents: Beckettissimo: Beckett virtuose de l'echo: 'fin de partie' et l'essence du bouddhisme (Emmanuel Jacquart).- Staging of institutional tensions in Beckett's plays (Juergen Siess).- Postmodern staging of 'waiting for Godot' (Mariko Hori Tanaka).- Staging himself, or Beckett's late style in the theatre (S.E. Gontarski). figure.

La mélancolie porte en elle l'héritage d'une très longue histoire, qui aura traversé de multiples champs de la culture: médecine de l'âme et du corps, arts et littérature, philosophie, religion... L'imaginaire de Samuel Beckett, son esthétique aussi, n'ont eu de cesse de se confronter à toutes ces facettes de la mélancolie, de se jouer d'elles, de les réinventer. Comment, pour le génie mélancolique, mieux cerner le mal qu'en l'abordant de manière détournée, par le biais de ceux qui avant lui le rencontrèrent ou tentèrent de percer son obscurité - tels Démocrite, Dürer, Robert Burton ? A travers ces miroirs, et bien d'autres encore, la mélancolie beckettienne se réfléchit, met en scène son théâtre intérieur, cherche à s'arracher à une emprise mortifère, tente d'apercevoir son image propre - scrute la terre sans perdre de vue l'horizon.

This volume constitutes a collection of over 40 articles selected from contributions to the Sydney Symposium of January 2003 that - as a part of an International Sydney Festival - was one of the major events related to Samuel Beckett of the last decade. The three sections of the book reflect the most vibrant fields of research in Beckett studies today: Intertextuality and Theory, Philosophy and Theory and Textual Genesis, Contextual Genesis and Language. Scholars from all over the world participating in this collection testify to the durable and universal nature of interest in Beckett's work.