Revisioning Beckett reassesses Beckett's career and literary output, particularly his engagement with what might be called decadent modernism. Gontarski approaches Beckett from multiple viewpoints: from his running afoul of the Irish Censorship of Publications Acts in the 1930s through the 1950s, his preoccupations to “find literature in the pornography, or beneath the pornography,” his battles with the Lord Chamberlain in the mid-1950s over London stagings of his first two plays, and his close professional and personal associations with publishers who celebrated the work of the demimonde. Much of that term encompasses an opening to the fullness of human experience denied in previous centuries, and much of that has been sexual or decadent. As Gontarski shows, the aesthetics that emerges from such early career encounters and associations continues to inform Beckett's work and develops into experimental modes that upend literary models and middle-class values, an aesthetics that, furthermore, has inspired any number of visual artists to re-vision Beckett.

Provides a comprehensive exploration of Beckett's historical, cultural and philosophical contexts, offering new critical insights for scholars and general readers.

Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real proposes writing as a mathematical and logical operation to build a bridge between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Samuel Beckett's prose works. Arka Chattopadhyay studies aspects such as the fundamental operational logic of a text, use of mathematical forms like geometry and arithmetic, the human obsession with counting, the moving body as an act of writing and love, and sexuality as a challenge to the limits of what can be written through logic and mathematics. Chattopadhyay reads Beckett's prose works, including How It Is, Company, Worstward Ho, Malone Dies and Enough to highlight this terminal writing, which halts endless meanings with the material body of the word and gives Beckett a medium to inscribe what cannot be written otherwise.

A selectively comprehensive bibliography of the vast literature about Samuel Beckett's dramatic works, arranged for the efficient and convenient use of scholars on all levels.

Reflecting the rich critical debate at the ‘Beckett and the State of Ireland’ conferences held in Dublin between 2011 and 2013, this volume brings together a selection of essays which explore and respond to the Irish concerns which echo in the fiction, drama, and poetry of Samuel Beckett. From the portrayals of the haunting landscape of South County Dublin in Beckett’s work to its interrogation of the political and social pieties of the infant nation state in which the author came to maturity, Beckett and the ‘State’ of Ireland uncovers the enduring presence of Ireland in one of the most influential bodies of writing in modern literature. Examining the politics of cultural identity, sexuality in the post-independence era, representations of disability in Beckett’s fiction and drama, Ireland’s culture of incarceration, the role of eugenics in the Irish cultural imagination, and the themes of exile and displacement in Beckett’s writing, amongst other concerns, Beckett and the ‘State’ of Ireland enriches understandings of the social, cultural, and political dimensions of Beckett’s work and introduces new and challenging perspectives to the study of Irish literature and culture.

Introduction -- Musical contrast in Albert Camus' L'étranger -- Musical counterpoint in Albert Camus' L'étranger -- Musical qualities in Samuel Beckett's En attendant Godot -- Silence in John Cage and Samuel Beckett : 4' 33" and En attendant Godot -- John Cage's collaboration of words and music in the song books -- The edited performance : Glenn Gould's solitude trilogy -- Musical and verbal counterpoint in two short films about Glenn Gould.

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

This transdisciplinary project represents the most comprehensive study of imagination to date. The eclectic group of international scholars who comprise Imagination and Art propose bold and innovative theoretical frameworks for (re-) conceptualizing imagination in all of its divergent forms.

Forming a pair with the voice, the gaze is a central structuring element of Samuel Beckett’s creation. And yet it takes the form of a strangely impersonal visual dimension testifying to the absence of an original exchange of gazes capable of founding personal identity and opening up the world to desire. The collapse of conventional reality and the highlighting of seeing devices—eyes, mirrors, windows—point to the absence of a unified representation. While masks and closed spaces show the visible to be opaque and devoid of any beyond, light and darkness, spectres—manifestations without origin—reveal a realm beyond the confines of identity, where nothing provides a mediation with the seen, or sets it within perspective. Finally, Beckett’s use of the audio-visual media deepens his exploration of the irreducibly real part of existence that escapes seeing. This study systematically examines these essential aspects of the visual in Beckett’s creation. The theoretical elaborations of Jacques Lacan—in relation with corresponding developments in the history and philosophy of the visual arts—offer an indispensible framework to understand the imaginary not as representation, but as rooted in the fundamental opacity of existence.