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.

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