From the contents: S.E. Gontarski: Style and the man: Samuel Beckett and the art of pastiche. - Veronique Le Gall: Carcasse et deraison: la nature morte. - Michael D'Arcy: The task of the listener: Beckett, Proust, and perpetual translation. - Florence Godeau: Molloy aux mille tours. - Julie Campbell: Moran as secret agent. - Steve Barfield and Philip Tew: Philosophy, psychoanalysis and parody: exceedingly Beckett."

Proust, Pastiche, and the Postmodern, or Why Style Matters argues against the traditional view that Marcel Proust wrote pastiches, that is, texts that imitate the style of another author, to master his literary predecessors while sharpening his writerly quill. On the contrary, James F. Austin demonstrates that Proust’s oeuvre, and In Search of Lost Time in particular, deploy pastiche to other ends: Proust’s pastiches, in fact, “do things with words” to create powerful real-world effects. His works are indeed performative acts that forge social relationships, redefine our ideas of literature, and even work against oppressive political and economic discourses. Building on the “speech-act” theory of J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, and J. Hillis Miller, and on the postmodern theory of Fredric Jameson, this book not only elucidates the performative nature of pastiche, but also shows that the famous “Goncourt” pastiche from In Search of Lost Time has attracted so much attention because it already attained the postmodern; that is, it eliminated temporal depth and experience, transforming time itself into a nostalgic style of an era, and into the sort of aestheticized surface that came to define postmodernism decades later. To reflect this transformation of pastiche, this work rearticulates its history in France around Proust. Reconfiguring a scholastic, classically-inspired pedagogical tradition based on imitation, and breaking with the dominant satirical practice, Proust’s work opened up possibilities in the twentieth century for a new kind of pastiche: playful and performative in the literary field, and postmodern in a French cinema that, as with the Goncourt pastiche, represents time as the visual style of an era, whether unreflexively in “heritage” films such as Régis Wargnier’s Indochine, or discerningly in Eric Rohmer’s Lady and the Duke, which uses period pictorial and painterly conventions to illustrate how the representation of history onscreen typically flattens time into style.

Between 1887 and 1927, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote sixty Sherlock Holmes stories, and his great canon has become the most studied chapter in the history of detective fiction. From the very first, the fascination of the original stories was such that other authors soon began writing new stories derived from Holmes. In almost every year of the twentieth century pastiches, parodies, burlesques, copies, and rivals of the detective appeared, but no comprehensive attempt has previously been made to collect and discuss these stories, all of which are of historical interest. The Alternative Sherlock Holmes does so, and provides a new approach to the Sherlock Holmes literature, as well as discussing many works that have for years remained forgotten. Although presented as an entertaining narrative, of interest to both the aficionado and the scholar, it provides full bibliographic data on virtually all the known stories.

In their own day, the works in this collection of now all-but-forgotten plays, composed between 1710 and 1820, enjoyed much critical and commercial success. For example, Nicholas Rowe's "The Tragedy of Jane Shore" (1714) was the most popular new play of the eighteenth century, and the sixth most performed tragedy, following "Hamlet," "Macbeth," "Romeo and Juliet,"" Othello" and "King Lear." Even William Shirley's forgotten play, "Edward the Black Prince" (1750), "was well received with great applause" and had a stage history spanning three decades. This collection includes the performance text to the 1796 Ireland play, "Vortigern." The plays are all reset and, where possible, modernized from original manuscripts, with listed variants, and parallel passages traced to Shakespearean canonical texts. The set includes a new introduction by the editor, and raises important questions about the nature of artistic property and authenticity, a key area of Shakespearean research today.

The year 2006 marked the centenary of the birth of Nobel-Prize winning playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett. To commemorate the occasion, this collection brings together twenty-three leading international Beckett scholars from ten countries, who take on the centenary challenge of "revolving it all": that is, going "back to Beckett"-the title of an earlier study by critic Ruby Cohn, to whom the book is dedicated-in order to rethink traditional readings and theories; provide new contexts and associations; and reassess his impact on the modern imagination and legacy to future generations. These original essays, most first presented by the Samuel Beckett Working Group at the Dublin centenary celebration, are divided into three sections: (1) Thinking through Beckett, (2) Shifting Perspectives, and (3) Echoing Beckett. As repeatedly in his canon, images precede words. The book opens with stills from films of experimental filmmaker Peter Gidal and unpublished excerpts from Beckett's 1936-37 German Travel Diaries, presented by Beckett biographer James Knowlson, with permission from the Beckett estate. Renowned director and theatre theoretician Herbert Blau follows with his personal Beckett "thinking through." Others in Part I explore Beckett and philosophy (Abbott), the influences of Bergson (Gontarski) and Leibniz (Mori), Beckett and autobiography (Locatelli), and Agamben on post-Holocaust testimony (Jones). Essays in Part II recontextualize Beckett's works in relation to iconography (Moorjani), film theoretician Rudolf Arnheim (Engelberts), Marshall McLuhan (Ben-Zvi), exilic writing (McMullan), Pierre Bourdieu's literary field (Siess), romanticism (Brater), social theorists Adorno and Horkheimer (Degani-Raz), and performance issues (Rodríguez-Gago). Part III relates Beckett's writing to that of Yeats (Okamuro), Paul Auster (Campbell), Caryl Churchill (Diamond), William Saroyan (Bryden), Minoru Betsuyaku and Harold Pinter (Tanaka) and Morton Feldman and Jasper Johns (Laws). Finally, Beckett himself becomes a character in other playwrights' works (Zeifman). Taken together these essays make a clear case for the challenges and rewards of thinking through Beckett in his second century.

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

An expressive dialogue between Deleuze's philosophical writings on cinema and Beckett's innovative film and television work, the book explores the relationship between the birth of the event – itself a simultaneous invention and erasure - and Beckett's attempts to create an incommensurable space within the interstices of language as a (W)hole.

Samuel Beckett produced some of the most powerful writing – some of the funniest but most devastating – of the twentieth century. He described his plays, prose and poetry as ‘an unnecessary stain on the silence’, but the extraordinary combination of concision and richness in his writing stems from his peculiar sensitivity to the sounds and rhythms of words. Moreover, music forms a part of Beckett’s comic aesthetics of failure: it plays a role in his exploration of the possibilities and failures of the imagination, and the ever-failing attempt to forge a sense of self. No wonder, then, that so many composers have taken inspiration from Beckett, setting his words to music or translating into music the dramatic themes or contexts of his work. Headaches Among the Overtones considers both music in Beckett and Beckett’s significance in contemporary music. In doing so, it explores the relationship between words, music and meaning, examining how comparable philosophical concerns and artistic effects appear in literature and music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Covers English literature, French literature, and theatre in the 20th century.