Bücher der Reihe New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century

Beckett and Levinas are of central importance to critical debates about literary ethics. Rather than suggest the preservation of literary and ethical value in the wake of the WWII, this book argues that both launched a sustained attack on the principles of literature, weaving narrative, and descriptive doubt through phenomenology, prose, and drama.

Beckett's Intuitive Spectator: Me to Play investigates how audience discomfort, instead of a side effect of a Beckett pedagogy, is a key spectatorial experience which arises from an everyman intuition of loss.

Samuel Beckett's work is deeply concerned with physical contact - remembered, half-remembered, or imagined. Applying the philosophical writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Merleau-Ponty that feature sensation, this study examines how Beckett's later work dramatizes moments of contact between self and self, self and world, and self and other.

This is the first book to focus on masculinity in Samuel Beckett's work as a way to understand his historical and national context, the difficulty of reading and interpreting his texts, and his ruthless disintegration of sexual and gendered norms throughout his oeuvre.

This book is the first sustained examination of Samuel Beckett's pivotal engagements with post-war BBC radio.

This book is the first sustained examination of Samuel Beckett's pivotal engagements with post-war BBC radio.

The global reception of Samuel Beckett raises numerous questions: in which areas of the world was Beckett first translated? Translating Samuel Beckett around the World brings together leading researchers in Beckett studies to discuss these questions and explore the fate of Beckett in their own societies and national languages.

Samuel Beckett's Legacies in American Fiction provides an overdue investigation into Beckett's rich influences over American writing.

Samuel Beckett¿s Legacies in American Fiction provides an overdue investigation into Beckett¿s rich influences over American writing. Through in-depth readings of postmodern authors such as Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster and Lydia Davis, this book situates Beckett¿s post-war writing of exhaustion and generation in relation to the emergence of an explosive American avant-garde. In turn, this study provides a valuable insight into the practical realities of Beckett¿s dissemination in America, following the author¿s long-standing relationship with the countercultural magazine Evergreen Review and its dramatic role in redrawing the possibilities of American culture in the 1960s. While Beckett would be largely removed from his American context, this book follows his vigorous, albeit sometimes awkward, reception alongside the authors and institutions central to shaping his legacies in 20th and 21st centuryAmerica.

Samuel Beckett¿s work is littered with ironic self-reflexive comments on presumed audience expectations that it should ultimately make explicable sense. An ample store of letters and anecdotes suggests Beckett¿s own preoccupation with and resistance to similar interpretive mindsets. Yet until now such concerns have remained the stuff of scholarly footnotes and asides.Beckett¿s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism addresses these issues head-on and investigates how Beckett¿s ideas about who he writes for affect what he writes. What it finds speaks to current understandings not only of Beckett¿s techniques and ambitions, but also of modernism¿s experiments as fundamentally compromised challenges to enshrined ways of understanding and organizing the social world. Beckett¿s uniquely anxious audience-targeting brings out similarly self-doubting strategies in the work of other experimental twentieth-century writers and artists in whom he is interested: his corpus proves emblematic of a modernism that understands its inability to achieve transformative social effects all at once, but that nevertheless judiciously complicates too-neat distinctions drawn within ongoing culture wars.For its re-evaluations of four key points of orientation for understanding Beckett¿s artistic ambitions¿his arch critical pronouncements, his postwar conflations of value and valuelessness, his often-ambiguous self-commentary, and his sardonic metatheatrical play¿as well as for its running dialogue with wider debates around modernism as a social phenomenon, this book is of interest to students and researchers interested in Beckett, modernism, and the relations between modern and contemporary artistic and social developments.