Beckett's Dying Words

Beckett's Dying Words PDF

Author: Christopher Ricks

Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 9780192824073

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Most people most of the time want to live for ever. But there is another truth; the longing for oblivion. With pain, wit, and humour, the art of Samuel Beckett variously embodies this truth, this ancient enduring belief that it is better to be dead than alive, best of all never to have been born. Beckett is the supreme writer of an age which has created new possiblities and impossibilities even in the matter of death and its definition, an age of transplants and life-support. But howdoes a writer give life to dismay at life itself, to the not-simply-unwelcome encroachments of death? After all, it is for the life, the vitality, of their language that we value writers. As a young man, Beckett himself praised Joyce's words. `They are alive.' Beckett became himself as a writer when he realized in his very words a principle of death. In cliches, which are dead but won't lie down. In a dead language and its memento mori. In words which mean their own opposites, cleaving andcleaving. In the self-stultifying or suicidal turn, dubbed the Irish bull. In what Beckett called a syntax of weakness. This book explores the relation between deep convictions about life or death and the incarnations which these take in the exact turns of a great writer - the realizations of an Irishman who wrote in English and in French, two languages with different apprehensions of life and of death.

The Letters of Samuel Beckett:

The Letters of Samuel Beckett: PDF

Author: Samuel Beckett

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-09-12

Total Pages: 886

ISBN-13: 9780521867948

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This second volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett opens with the War years, when it was often impossible or too dangerous to correspond. The surge of letters beginning in 1945, and their variety, are matched by the outpouring and the range of Beckett's published work. Primarily written in French and later translated by the author, the work includes stories, a series of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable), essays and plays - most notably Waiting for Godot. The letters chronicle a passionately committed but little known writer evolving into a figure of international reputation, and his response to such fame. The volume provides detailed introductions which discuss Beckett's situation during the War and his crucial move into the French language, as well as translations of the letters, explanatory notes, year-by-year chronologies, profiles of correspondents and other contextual information.

The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940

The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940 PDF

Author: Samuel Beckett

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-02-05

Total Pages: 866

ISBN-13: 9780521867931

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The letters written by Samuel Beckett between 1929 and 1940 provide a vivid and personal view of Western Europe in the 1930s, and mark the gradual emergence of Beckett's unique voice and sensibility. The Cambridge University Press edition of The Letters of Samuel Beckett offers for the first time a comprehensive range of letters of one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century. Selected for their bearing on his work from over 15,000 extant letters, the letters published in this four-volume edition encompass sixty years of Beckett's writing life (1929-1989), and include letters to friends, painters and musicians, as well as to students, publishers, translators, and colleagues in the world of literature and theater. For anyone interested in twentieth-century literature and theater this edition is essential reading, offering not only a record of Beckett's achievements but a powerful literary experience in itself.

Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats

Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats PDF

Author: Gordon S. Armstrong

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780838751411

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In contrast to the many critics who consider W. B. Yeats a dominant influence on Beckett's drama, this study demonstrates that the two are almost diametrically opposed in their theater and that the real bridge to Beckett's art is to be found in the narrative and pictorial creations of the younger Yeats brother, Jack.

Beckett's Words

Beckett's Words PDF

Author: David Kleinberg-Levin

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-07-30

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1474216889

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

At stake in this book is a struggle with language in a time when our old faith in the redeeming of the word-and the word's power to redeem-has almost been destroyed. Drawing on Benjamin's political theology, his interpretation of the German Baroque mourning play, and Adorno's critical aesthetic theory, but also on the thought of poets and many other philosophers, especially Hegel's phenomenology of spirit, Nietzsche's analysis of nihilism, and Derrida's writings on language, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, because of its communicative and revelatory powers, language bears the utopian "promise of happiness," the idea of a secular redemption of humanity, at the very heart of which must be the achievement of universal justice. In an original reading of Beckett's plays, novels and short stories, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, despite inheriting a language damaged, corrupted and commodified, Beckett redeems dead or dying words and wrests from this language new possibilities for the expression of meaning. Without denying Beckett's nihilism, his picture of a radically disenchanted world, Kleinberg-Levin calls attention to moments when his words suddenly ignite and break free of their despair and pain, taking shape in the beauty of an austere yet joyous lyricism, suggesting that, after all, meaning is still possible.

Collected Poems in English and French

Collected Poems in English and French PDF

Author: Samuel Beckett

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 0802198449

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This collection gathers together the Nobel Prize-winning writer Samuel Beckett's English poems (including Whoroscope, his first published verse), English translations of poems by Eluard, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and Chamfort, and poems in French, several of which are presented in translation.

Beckett’s Late Stage

Beckett’s Late Stage PDF

Author: Rhys Tranter

Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand

Published: 2018-02-28

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 3838210352

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Beckett’s Late Stage reexamines the Nobel laureate’s post-war prose and drama in the light of contemporary trauma theory. Through a series of sustained close-readings, the study demonstrates how the comings and goings of Beckett’s prose unsettles the Western philosophical tradition; it reveals how Beckett’s live theatrical productions are haunted by the rehearsal of traumatic repetition, and asks what his ghostly radio recordings might signal for twentieth-century modernity. Drawing from psychoanalytic and poststructuralist traditions, Beckett’s Late Stage explores how the traumatic symptom allows us to rethink the relationship between language, meaning, and identity after 1945.

Ten Ways of Thinking About Samuel Beckett

Ten Ways of Thinking About Samuel Beckett PDF

Author: Enoch Brater

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-06-13

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1408137232

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Beckett is acknowledged as one of the greatest playwrights and most innovative fiction writers of the twentieth century with an international appeal that bridges both general and more specialist readers. This collection of essays by renowned Beckett scholar Enoch Brater offers a delightfully original, playful and intriguing series of approaches to Beckett's drama, fiction and poetry. Beginning with a chapter entitled 'Things to Ponder While Waiting for Godot', each essay deftly illuminates aspects of Beckett's thinking and craft, making astute and often surprising discoveries along the way. In a series of beguiling discussions such as 'From Dada to Didi: Beckett and the Art of His Century', 'Beckett's Devious Interventions, or Fun with Cube Roots' and 'The Seated Figure on Beckett's Stage', Brater proves the perfect companion and commentator on Beckett's work, helping readers to approach it with fresh eyes and a renewed sense of the author's unique aesthetic. 'An eloquent, witty and erudite collection of essays that illuminates Beckett's drama and prose fiction from a number of complementary perspectives. Brater's precise explication of the interwoven tropes of language and mise-en-scène is combined with a fine grasp of the overarching structure of work ... to create a rich and suggestive series of reflections on Beckett's aesthetics.' - Robert Gordon, Professor of Drama, Goldsmiths, University of London

Transdisciplinary Beckett

Transdisciplinary Beckett PDF

Author: Lucy Jeffery

Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand

Published: 2021-11-16

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 3838215842

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This is the first monograph to analyse Beckett’s use of the visual arts, music, and broadcasting media through a transdisciplinary approach. It considers how Beckett’s complex and varied use of art, music, and media in a selection of his novels, radio plays, teleplays, and later short prose informs his creative process. Investigating specific instances where Beckett’s writing adopts musical or visual structures, Lucy Jeffery identifies instances of Beckett’s transdisciplinarity and considers how this approach to writing facilitates ways of expressing familiar Beckettian themes of abstraction, ambiguity, longing, and endlessness. With case studies spanning forty years, she evaluates Beckett’s stylistic shifts in relation to the cultural context, particularly the technological advancements and artistic movements, during which they were written. With new examples from Beckett’s notebooks, critical essays, and letters, Transdisciplinary Beckett evidences how the drastic changes that took place in the visual arts and in musical composition influenced Beckett and, in turn, were influenced by him. Transdisciplinary Beckett situates Beckett as a key figure not just in the literary marketplace but also in the fields of music, art, and broadcasting.

Remembering and the Sound of Words

Remembering and the Sound of Words PDF

Author: Adam Piette

Publisher:

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In this book Adam Piette establishes fascinating new links between sound effects and the representation of memory in literary texts. He sets out a workable taxonomy of sound-repetitions in prose and formulates, through a theory of alerting-devices, the ways in which the reader's attention is drawn to the acoustic surface of the text. Piette scrutinizes Mallarm 's prose-poetry, Proust's musical syntax, Joyce's memory-rhymes (from the Portrait of the Artist through Ulysses to Finnegans Wake), and Beckett's prose and drama, demonstrating that sound effects act as intricate reminders of memory-traces in the text. Despite how widely the four writers diverge in their representations of memory, Piette shows that the use of this memory-rhyme technique is common to them all.