Beckett at 100: Revolving It All

by Linda Ben-Zvi, Angela Moorjani

Overview

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 The book opens with stills from films of experimental filmmaker Peter Gidal and unpublished excerpts from Beckett's 1936-37 German Travel Diaries, presented by Beckett biographer James Knowlson, with permission from the Beckett estate.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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190296032
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	01/08/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Linda Ben-Zvi is Professor of Theatre Studies, Tel Aviv University and Professor emerita, English and Theatre, Colorado State University. Among her twelve books are Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times (Oxford UP, 2005). She is a recipient of the George Freedley Special Jury Prize, Theatre Library Association, and was a John Stern Distinguished Professor at Ciolorado, Fellow at the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lady Davis Professor at Hebrew University, and twice elected President of the International Samuel Beckett Society. Angela Moorjani is emerita professor of modern languages and linguistics (French) at the University of Maryland-UMBC. Her many studies of Samuel Beckett and the aesthetic and ethical effects of melancholy in literature and the arts include the postructural Abysmal Games in the Novels of Samuel Beckett (1982), The Aesthetics of Loss and Lessness (1992) and Beyond Fetishism (2000).

Table of Contents

Contributors     ix
Introduction   Linda Ben-Zvi     3
Images. For Ruby Cohn
Still for Ruby   Peter Gidal     15
Beckett the Tourist: Bamberg and Wurzburg   James Knowlson     21
Thinking Through Beckett
Apnea and True Illusion: Breath(less) in Beckett   Herbert Blau     35
From Contumacy to Shame: Reading Beckett's Testimonies with Agamben   David Houston Jones     54
Projections: Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape and Not I as Autobiographies   Carla Locatelli     68
"I Am Not a Philosopher"   H. Porter Abbott     81
Recovering Beckett's Bergsonism   S. E. Gontarski     93
"No Body Is at Rest": The Legacy of Leibniz's Force in Beckett's Oeuvre   Naoya Mori     107
Shifting Perspectives
"Just Looking": Ne(i)ther-World Icons, Elsheimer Nocturnes, and Other Simultaneities in Beckett's Play   Angela Moorjani     123
Beckett's Romanticism   Enoch Brater     139
Film and Film: Beckett and Early Film Theory   Matthijs Engelberts     152
Beckett's Theater: Embodying Alterity   Anna McMullan     166
Beckett's Posture in the French Literary Field   Jurgen Siess     177
The Spear of Telephus in Krapp's Last Tape   Irit Degani-Raz     190
Re-Figuring the Stage Body through the Mechanical Re-Production of Memory   Antonia Rodriguez-Gago     202
Echoing Beckett
Words and Music, ... but the clouds..., and Yeats's "The Tower"   Minako Okamuro     217
Beckett-Feldman-Johns   Catherine Laws     230
Ontological Fear and Anxiety in the Theater of Beckett, Betsuyaku, and Pinter   Mariko Hori Tanaka     246
The Midcentury Godot: Beckett and Saroyan   Mary Bryden     259
Beckett, McLuhan, and Television: The Medium, the Message, and "the Mess"   Linda Ben-Zvi     271
Beckett and Caryl Churchill along the Mobius Strip   Elin Diamond     285
Beckett and Paul Auster: Fathers and Sons and the Creativity of Misreading   Julie Campbell     299
Staging Sam: Beckett as Dramatic Character   Hersh Zeifman     311
Index     319