This book considers how Samuel Beckett’s critical essays, dialogues and reflections drew together longstanding philosophical discourses about the nature of representation, and fostered crucial, yet overlooked, connections between these discourses and his fiction and poetry. It also pays attention to Beckett’s writing for little-magazines in France from the 1930s to the 1950s, before going on to consider how the style of Beckett’s late prose recalls and develops figures and themes in his critical writing. By providing a long-overdue assessment of Beckett’s work as a critic, this study shows how Beckett developed a new aesthetic in knowing dialogue with ideas including phenomenology, Kandinsky’s theories of abstraction, and avant-garde movements such as Surrealism. This book will be illuminating for students and researchers interested not just in Beckett, but in literary modernism, the avant-garde, European visual culture and philosophy.

This book considers how Samuel Beckett’s critical essays, dialogues and reflections drew together longstanding philosophical discourses about the nature of representation, and fostered crucial, yet overlooked, connections between these discourses and his fiction and poetry. It also pays attention to Beckett’s writing for little-magazines in France from the 1930s to the 1950s, before going on to consider how the style of Beckett’s late prose recalls and develops figures and themes in his critical writing. By providing a long-overdue assessment of Beckett’s work as a critic, this study shows how Beckett developed a new aesthetic in knowing dialogue with ideas including phenomenology, Kandinsky’s theories of abstraction, and avant-garde movements such as Surrealism. This book will be illuminating for students and researchers interested not just in Beckett, but in literary modernism, the avant-garde, European visual culture and philosophy.

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.

Leland de la Durantaye helps us understand Beckett’s strangeness and notorious difficulty by arguing that Beckett’s lifelong campaign was to mismake on purpose—not to denigrate himself, or his audience, or reconnect with the child or savage within, but because he believed that such mismaking is in the interest of art and will shape its future.

In this fascinating new exploration of Samuel Beckett’s work, Pascale Casanova argues that Beckett’s reputation rests on a pervasive misreading of his oeuvre, which neglects entirely the literary revolution he instigated. Reintroducing the historical into the heart of this body of work, Casanova provides an arresting portrait of Beckett as radically subversive—doing for writing what Kandinsky did for art—and in the process presents the key to some of the most profound enigmas of Beckett’s writing.

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.

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.

Trying to understand Endgame / Theodor W. Adorno -- Life in the box / Hugh Kenn er -- Hamm, Clov, and the dramatic method in Endgame / Anthony Easthope -- Endi ng the waiting game / Stanley Cavell -- Beckett / Richard Gilman Symbolic struc ture and creative obligation in Endgame / Paul Lawley -- The play that was rewr itten / Ruby Cohn -- Endgame / Sidney Homan.

The work of the eminent French cultural critic Louis Marin (1931-92) is becoming increasingly important to English-speaking scholars concerned with issues of representation. To Destroy Painting, first published in France in 1977, marks a milestone in Marin's thought about the aims of painting in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A meditation on the work of Poussin and Caravaggio and on their milieux, the book explores a number of notions implied by theories of painting and offers insight into the aims and effects of visual representaion.

A powerful, genre-defying meditation, with Beckett at its origin, that touches on mysteries as varied as literary celebrity, baseball, and why we feel the need to be cruel to one another Following the schema of Samuel Beckett's unpublished "Long Observation of the Ray," of which only six manuscript pages exist, poet and critic Michael Coffey interleaves multiple narratives according to an arithmetic sequence laid out by Beckett in his notes. This rhythm of themes and genres--involving personal memoir, literary criticism, Beckett studies, contemporary political reportage and accounts of state-sponsored torture in appropriated texts, plus an Arabian Tale and even a baseballplay-by-play--produce a work at once sculptural, theatrical, mathematical and above all lyrical, a new form of narrative answering to a freshened rule set. In executing Beckett's most radical undertaking--one scholar referred to "Long Observation of the Ray" as a "monument to extinction"--Coffey gives readers access to an open field in which ruminations on writing mix with an engagement with Beckett scholarship as well as the unsettling chaos in today's world. Although Beckett, like any writer, had his share of abandoned works, he was in the habit of "unabandoning" on occasion. Coffey's effort here salvages a Beckett project from a half-century ago and brings it to the surface, with the contemporary markings of its hauling.