Product Description
This book is a study of the evolving role of women throughout Beckett's work. Beckett's early writing is structured upon very sharply defined gender polarities-objects of alarm, lust, derision, or indifference. Beckett's shift from fiction to stage and media drama-giving a voice to women-unsettles this adversarial structure. In later prose and drama, gender qualifies Beckett's people for neither fear nor favor. Mary Bryden's analysis drawing on the insights of such French writers as Deleuze and Guattari, and Helene Cixous, traces how gender dualisms are undermined over the course of Beckett's writing career. She examines the status of sexual indeterminacy in Beckett's work, and concludes with a remarkable case study: that of the mother figure, whose profile alters from dread to tenderness. The book embraces not only Beckett's published prose and drama, but also a number of unpublished and draft manuscripts from Reading University's Beckett Archive. "Women in Samuel Beckett's Prose and Drama", will be of great interest to Literary Studies courses in both French and English departments, and Women's Studies courses. Contents: Introduction; Space Invaders: Women of the Early Fiction; Beckett and Deleuze: Gender in Process; Undoing the "Not": Women of the Early Drama; "No Better than Shades No Worse": Women of the Later Drama; Nomad Selves: Women of the Later Prose; Otherhood/Motherhood/Smotherhood: The Mother in Beckett's Writing; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
"The World of Samuel Beckett" brings together a distinguished group of authorities, among them Beckett's longtime associates and colleagues Herbert Blau and Martin Esslin. In a chapter on Beckett's "Enough", Blau concedes that parts of the playwright's work can be lyrical and beguiling, but "it's still an appalling vision". Esslin (who coined the term "theater of the absurd") challenges the notion that Beckett is difficult or depressing, arguing instead that he is basically a comic writer, gallows humor thought it be. Angela Moorjani sees Beckett's writing as the product of a cryptic text inscribed within. Bennett Simon, a psychiatrist who has written extensively on Beckett, examines the self in current art and psychoanalysis. Joseph H. Smith emphasizes that Beckett, like Freud and Lacan, challenges any notions of "cure" as the easy achievement of happiness. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Use of language is extraordinary but ...
I knew I was in trouble when the first poem Whoroscope had notes half as long as the poem.I don't mind poems requiring multiple readings to be understood but I don't enjoy treating a poem as an encryption problem.

Onmore accessible poems such as "Vulture" or "Cascando"the power of the language more than carried the poem - the cadence of thewords being the characteristic first noted, then his play onwords.

Ultimately, the pleasure of the poems that are immediatelyaccessible outweighs the annoyance at the poems requiring deciphering. Hence, I will probable read additional poetry by Beckett and encourage thebrave-hearted to read this volume. ... Read more

Product Description
Samuel Beckett was perhaps the most unconventional playwright of the twentieth century. His plays broke all the rules by dispensing with traditional concepts of plot, scene, and character, concentrating instead on the experience of the drama itself. An intensely private man, Beckett's work was profoundly influenced by his relationship with his mother and what he called her "savage loving," and by the tensions and hypocrisies of his divided country. In his work, he presents us with our own humanity; the hopelessness and the solitude, the bizarre tragicomedy of life itself.

Many of the items collected in this volume have never been published, among them the transcription of a 1938 letter from James Joyce to Beckett's brother Frank, assuring that Beckett was recovering under the Joyce family's care after an unprovoked stabbing by a Paris pimp. Photos from many of Beckett's play productions, his childhood home and family in Dublin, and manuscript pages complement an incisive biography by Beckett scholar Gerry Dukes, providing a unique introduction to the life and work of one of drama's great masters. ... Read more

Product Description
Presents an overview of the work of Samuel Beckett. Discussing his famous as well as lesser known texts, the book shows how his characters incorporate silence in their speech to narrate their deaths. Finally it examines "Stirring Still", his last text, which evokes his own imminent death. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

This is an excellent survey of Beckett's work.
Alan Astro has done a magnificent job of reading Beckett's oeuvre.His analysis is acute and sometimes brilliant: I have never read a better piece on _Endgame_, and Astro's take on _Watt_ is incredible.There is no contemporary critic who has dealt with the primacy of the signifier in Beckett's work the way that Alan Astro has, is, and will continue (we hope) to do.His contribution to scholarship and performance cannot be overstated. ... Read more

Product Description
The Collected Critical Heritage II comprises 40 volumes covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995. The Critical Heritage series gathers together a large body of critical figures in literature. These carefully selected sources include: * contemporary reviews from both popular and literary media.In these students can read about how Lady Chatterly's Lover shocked contemporary reviewers or what Ibsen's Doll's House meant to the early women's movement * little-published documentary material such as diaries and correspondence - often between authors and their publishers and critics * significant pieces of criticism from later periods to demonstrate how an author's reputation changed over time ... Read more

Product Description
A literary study focusing on the elements of human desire and paradox manifest in the fictional works of Samuel Beckett. Watson examines the strucure and content of Beckett's narrative in a number of works including "Mal vu mal dit", "Bing", "Company", "Westward Ho" and "Le Depeupleur". ... Read more

Product Description
Shorter Plays follows Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Krapp's Last Tape in this highly praised series of Beckett's notebooks, which show for the first time the extensive revisions made by Beckett during revivals of his plays. From the mid-1960s, Samuel Beckett himself directed all his major plays in Berlin, Paris or London. For most of these productions he meticulously prepared notebooks for his personal use.

The Theatrical Notebooks of Beckett that are reproduced in facsimile here offer a remarkable record of his own involvement with the staging of his texts. They present his solutions to practical problems of staging but also provide a unique insight into his way of envisaging his own plays.

With additional information taken from Beckett's own annotated and corrected copies, S.E. Gontarski has also been able to constitute a revised text for each of the plays. This new text contains Beckett's many changes, corrections, additions and cuts.

This volume includes the complete and definitive texts for such plays as Embers, Cascando, Play, Eh Joe, Not I, and Footfalls, as well as his mimes, radio and television plays.

The other volumes in this series are Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape, and Waiting for Godot. ... Read more

Product Description
In this personal account of Samuel Beckett's theatre, Katharine Worth draws on a wealth of remarkable material, such as her own work producing and directing Beckett's plays, the experience of watching other productions, and conversations and correspondence with Beckett. This book focuses on the power that Beckett's theatre has to fascinate the viewer with the ordinary experiences of life as well as its great mysteries. ... Read more

Product Description
Increasingly Samuel Beckett is seen as the culmination of the great literature of the twentieth century - the successor to Proust, Joyce and Kafka, and a writer whose relevance to his time and use of poetic imagery can be compared to Shakespeare's in the late Renaissance. But John Calder has examined the work of Beckett principally for what it has to say about our time in terms of philosophy, theology and ethics, and he points to aspects of his subject's thinking that others have ignored or preferred not to see. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Beckett's publisher's humanist thought
John Calder, British publisher of Beckett, is ideally placed to provide his own determinedly secular reading of SB. I have my arguments about some of his stubborn persistence in removing God from Beckett to leave that Sartrian "god-shaped hole," but after all, Beckett is notoriously and delightfully difficult to pin down and resists easy categorisation about the presence or absence of the deity in his fictions and dramas and other unclassifiable prose. Calder's exegesis gains added conviction from the closeness between author and publisher for so long.

Calder raises an intriguing point: Joyce and Kafka were one-trick, if very talented, ponies next to the variety of genres assayed by SB. Calder delves into what J & K lacked (in his opinion) next to their modernist (and post-modernist, given his lifespan and continuing productions) successor: in Beckett, in his life as in his literature, we find a stoic, compassionate, and above all forgiving mentor. Like sincere religious gurus in the past, his message conveys a detachment from greed, solipsism, fanaticism in the pursuit of a cause or a creed, and care for creatures and the defenseless among us. Remember his early story, with Dante's lobster? Personally, I'd reinforce SB's own charity and thoughtfulness, expressed often without fanfare, and how he humbly practiced what he printed. Calder was moved by the author's morality, too, and he writes this study to promote an understanding of SB less for the literati than for the thinkers, and doers, who need guidance in a world in which faith cannot be thrown away to abstractions rather than channeled into action, responses to assuage real human agony now.

Calder explores philosophical, ethical, and religious sources for Beckett's early writings, and compares his own musings to those of Beckett on these matters. The resulting conversation of sorts between SB and Calder invites us to consider our own responses to human suffering, as limned in Beckett's creations and as influencing Calder himself as he became friends with SB.
While I disagree with some of Calder's readings, I fully support his aims, and stress that this is an excellent study that deserves an audience and incites a reader to return to Beckett for direction as well as out into the world to act as SB would. If this sounds like Calder makes SB a guru, so be it. For many otherwise in danger of meeting the tautological fate of many of SB's tormented characters, we can learn to read Beckett as a direction out of our own self-imprisonent towards selflessness.

I've read a shelf-load of Beckettiana, and I admit that this book, overlooked and not easily found, remains among the two or three to turn to after or during encounters with the primary texts. Not recommended as an introduction or primer (if you're starting from scratch, try Hugh Kenner's Student's Guide to SB); you must get your own bearings and learn to respond on your own terms to SB first. But, for a boost and a reminder of the challenges within--and I might add against reductive--existentialism, Calder gives us a heartfelt, eloquent, and accessible study of a man he knew well and, like many of us, loved for his inspiring humanism. ... Read more