Published in association with the seminar series of the same name held by the University of Oxford, Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies presents the best new scholarship addressing the sources, development and ongoing influence of Samuel Beckett's work. Edited by convenors Dr Peter Fifield and Dr David Addyman, the volume presents ten research essays by leading international scholars ranging across Beckett's work, opening up new avenues of enquiry and association for scholars, students and readers of Beckett's work. Among the subjects covered the volume includes studies of: ·Beckett and the influence of new media 1956-1960 ·the influence of silent film on Beckett's work ·death, loss and Ireland in Beckett's drama - tracing Irish references in Beckett's plays from the 1950s and 1960s, including Endgame, All That Fall, Krapp's Last Tape and Eh Joe ·a consideration of Beckett's theatrical notebooks and annotated copies of his plays which provide a unique insight into his attitude toward the staging of his plays, the ways he himself interpreted his texts and approached theatrical practice. ·the French text of the novel Mercier et Camier, which both biographically and aesthetically appeared at a very significant moment in Beckett's career and indicates a crucial development in his writing ·the matter of tone in Beckett's drama, offering a new reading of the ways in which this elusive property emerges and can be read in the relationship between published text, canon and performance

This text presents new scholarship addressing the sources, development and ongoing influence of Samuel Beckett's work. It presents 10 research essays by international scholars ranging across Beckett's work, opening up new avenues of enquiry and association for scholars, students and readers of Beckett's work.

Samuel Beckett and the Language of Subjectivity is the first sustained exploration of aporia as a vital, subversive, and productive figure within Beckett's writing as it moves between prose and theatre. Informed by key developments in analytic and continental philosophies of language, Tubridy's fluent analysis demonstrates how Beckett's translations - between languages, genres, bodies, and genders - offer a way out of the impasse outlined in his early aesthetics. The primary modes of the self's extension into the world are linguistic (speaking, listening) and material (engaging with bodies, spaces and objects). Yet what we mean by language has changed in the twenty-first century. Beckett's concern with words must be read through the information economy in which contemporary identities are forged. Derval Tubridy provides the groundwork for new insights on Beckett in terms of the posthuman: the materialist, vitalist and relational subject cathected within differential mechanisms of power.

A collection of research by leading international scholars on Beckett and phenomenology - both comparing and contrasting his work with key figures in phenomenology and analysing phenomenological themes and their dramatization in Beckett's work.

Examines the intersection of Samuel Beckett's thirty-second playlet Breath with the visual artsSamuel Beckett, one of the most prominent playwrights of the twentieth century, wrote a thirty-second playlet for the stage that does not include actors, text, characters or drama but only stage directions. Breath (1969) is the focus and the only theatrical text examined in this study, which demonstrates how the piece became emblematic of the interdisciplinary exchanges that occur in Beckett's later writings, and of the cross-fertilisation of the theatre with the visual arts. The book attends to fifty breath-related artworks (including sculpture, painting, new media, sound art, performance art) and contextualises Beckett's Breath within the intermedial and high-modernist discourse thereby contributing to the expanding field of intermedial Beckett criticism. Key FeaturesExamines Beckett's ultimate venture to define the borders between a theatrical performance and purely visual representationJuxtaposes Beckett's Breath with breath-related artworks by prominent visual artists who investigate the far-reaching potential of the representation of respiration by challenging modernist essentialismThe focus on this primary human physiological function and its relation to arts and culture is highly pertinent to studies of human performance, the nature of embodiment and its relation to cultural expressionFacilitates new intermedial discourses around the nature and aesthetic possibilities of breath, the minimum condition of existence, at the interface between the visual arts and performance practices and their relation to questions of spectacle, objecthood and materiality

Beckett's Political Imagination uncovers Beckett's lifelong engagement with political thought and political history, showing how this concern informed his work as fiction author, dramatist, critic and translator. This radically new account will appeal to students, researchers and Beckett lovers alike.

Table of Contents/Table des matières Early Modern Beckett/Beckett et le début de l¿ère moderne Introduction/Avant-propos I. In Dialogue with Dramatists and Writers/En dialogue avec des auteurs dramatiques et des écrivains Carla Taban: Le Molière de Beckett Angela Moorjani: Beckett¿s Racinian Fictions: ¿Racine and the Modern Novel¿ Revisited Danièle de Ruyter: Fascination de la tragédie Racinienne: résonances dans Oh les beaux jours Arka Chattopadhyay: ¿Worst In Need Of Worse¿: King Lear, Worstward Ho and the Trajectory of Worsening Julie Campbell: Allegories of Clarity and Obscurity: Bunyan¿s The Pilgrim¿s Progress and Beckett¿s Molloy Seán Kennedy: Edmund Spenser, Famine Memory and the Discontents of Humanism in Endgame Melanie Foehn: A Rhetoric of Discontinuity: On Stylistic Parallels between Pascal¿s Pensées and Samuel Beckett¿s L¿Innommable II. In Dialogue with Philosophers and Artists/En dialogue avec des philosophes et des artistes Yoshiyuki Inoue: Cartesian Mechanics in Beckett¿s Fin de Partie Layla M. Roesler: En compagnie d¿une métaphysique parodique: Beckett lecteur de Descartes redux Everett C. Frost: Beckett and Geulincx¿s Ethics: ¿¿my Geulincx could only be a literary fantasia¿ Naoya Mori: Beckett¿s Faint Cries: Leibniz¿s petites perceptions in First Love and Malone Dies Claire Lozier: Présence de la sculpture funéraire des débuts de l¿époque moderne dans l¿¿uvre narrative de Samuel Beckett: du motif artistique religieux à sa laïcisation scripturale Joanne Shaw: Light and Darkness in Elsheimer, Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Beckett Beckett Between/Beckett entre deux Introduction Dúnlaith Bird: Light, Landscape and Beckett James Williams: Beckett between the Words: Punctuation and the Body in the English Prose Alys Moody: The Non-Lieu of Hunger: Post-war Beckett and the Genealogies of Starvation Dirk Van Hulle: The Extended Mind and Multiple Drafts: Beckett¿s Models of the Mind and the Postcognitivist Paradigm Everett C. Frost: Beckett and Geulincx¿s Metaphysics: ¿Without knowing why exactly¿ John Wall: ¿L¿au-delà du dehors-dedans¿: Paradox, Space and Movement in Beckett Lea Sinoimeri: ¿Ill-Told Ill-Heard¿: Aurality and Reading in Comment c¿est/How It Is Karine Germoni and Pascale Sardin: Tensions of the In-Between: Rhythm, Tonelessness and Lyricism in Fin de partie/Endgame Iain Baily: Beckett, Bilingualism and the Bible Garin Dowd: The Proxemics of ¿Neither¿ Contributors/Auteurs

The dozen essays brought together here, alongside a newly-written introduction, contextualize and exemplify the recent 'empirical turn' in Beckett studies. Characterized, above all, by recourse to manuscript materials in constructing revisionist interpretations, this approach has helped to transform the study of Samuel Beckett over the past generation. In addition to focusing upon Beckett's early immersion in philosophy and psychology, other chapters similarly analyze his later collaboration with the BBC through the lens of literary history. Falsifying Beckett thus offers new readings of Beckett by returning to his archive of notebooks, letters, and drafts. In reassessing key aspects of his development as one of the 20th century's leading artists, this collection is of interest to all students of Beckett's writing as well as ' historicist' scholars and critics of modernism more generally.

This study explores the concept of Stimmung in literary and philosophical texts of the modern age. Signifying both 'mood' and 'attunement', Stimmung speaks to the categories of affective experience and aesthetic design alike. The study locates itself in the nexus between discourses on modernity, existentialism and aesthetics and uncovers the pivotal role of Stimmung in 19th- and 20th-century European narrative fiction and continental philosophy. The study first explores the philosophical and aesthetic origins and implications of Stimmung to, then, discuss its role in the narrative fiction of three key authors of modern literature: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard. These readings demonstrate a significant shift towards an aesthetic of affective intensity and immediacy, in which the experience of the reading process takes centre stage as each author develops an aesthetic philosophy of Stimmung in their own right. Through its focus on the concept of Stimmung, the study thus unearths a fundamental link between existentialist concerns and narrative practice in modern literature.

Beckett’s Voices / Voicing Beckett uses ‘voice’ as a prism to investigate Samuel Beckett’s work across a range of texts, genres, and cultures. Twenty-one international contributors evaluate Beckett’s contemporary artistic legacy in relation to music, media, performance, and philosophy.