Samuel Beckett
Edited by Jennifer Birkett & Kate Ince
Sep 1999
Pearson Education / Longman
ISBN: 0582298075
304 pages, Illustrated, 4 ¼" x 8 ½"
$57.50 Paper original
The book aims to make easily accessible to students and scholars stimulating and innovative writing on the work of Samuel Beckett, representing the wide range of new perspectives opened up by contemporary critical theory: philosophical, political and psychoanalytic criticism, feminist and gender studies, semiotics, and reception theory.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Editors' Note
Introduction
Part One : Political Criticism
1 Theodor W. Adorno Trying to Understand Endgame
2 Stephen Watt Beckett by Way of Baudrillard : Toward a Political Reading
of Samuel Beckett's Drama
3 Patricia Coughlan 'The Poetry is Another Pair of Sleeves' : Beckett, Ireland
and Modernist Lyric Poetry
Part Two : Literature/Philosophy
4 Georges Bataille Molloy's Silence
5 Maurice Blanchot Where now? Who now?
6 Leslie Hill The Trilogy Translated
Part Three : Deconstruction
7 Steven Connor Voice and Mechanical Reproduction : Krapp's Last Tape, Ohio
Impromptu, Rockaby, That Time
8 Thomas Trezise Dispossession
Part Four : Psychoanalytic Criticism
9 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Disiring - Production : The Schizo's
Stroll
10 David Watson The Fictional Body ; Le Depeupleur
11 Daniel Katz 'Alone in the Accusative' : Beckett's Narcissistic Echoes
Part Five : Reader Reception
12 Wolfgang Iser The Art of Failure: The Stifled Laugh in Beckett's Theater
Part Six : Semiotics
13 Carla Locatelli Comic Strategies in Beckett's Narratives
Part Seven : Feminism/Gender
14 Julia Kristeva The Father, Love and Banishment
15 Linda Ben-Zvi Not I : Through a Tube Starkly
Glossary
Notes on Authors
Further Reading
Index
Features
• Brings together seminal writings on Beckett from the 1950s and 1960s
with critical readings from the 1980s and 1990s.
• The writings cover the whole range of Beckett's creative work.
• Fifteen extracts of Beckett criticism are introduced and set in context
by editors' headnotes.
• A full editorial introduction gives an up-to-date review and analysis
of Beckett criticism.
• Contains a full Bibliography which is organized to guide students
through the different areas of Beckett criticism, and there is a glossary
of theoretical terms.