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At the beginning of Samuel Beckett's radio play, All That Fall, Mrs Rooney famously forgets her lines: she cannot quite remember the precise phrase that she strains to recall from John Ford's The Lover's Melancholy. However, what has been overlooked is Beckett's own forgetfulness as to the origins of this intertextual reference. Repeatedly, he attributes this line (and others from his wider stock of notes) to one of Ford's close contemporaries: John Marston. This article recovers Beckett's many mistaken allusions to Marston, and begins to think through the ways in which his curious recurrence in Beckett's thinking at the time of All That Fall's composition might betray a particular interest in the revenge genre (in which Marston is so influential). It posits that, in writing All That Fall, Beckett works to 'vaguen' many of the formal tropes that recur over the course of revenge drama's long literary history. It then goes on to explore the possibility that this play for voices might engage specifically with this generic tradition in order to stage a critique of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the formal and critical consequences of organizing an aesthetic corpus around the philosophical concept of the fragment via a reading of Aryan Kaganof's "Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers" (1994). This experimental video sets spoken accounts from the perspective of the likes of Ted Bundy and Charles Manson alongside grainy, ambiguous imagery. Instead of thematic meditations on violence, the monologues circle around quasi-nostalgic reflections on the past and the nature of identity. The film frustrates any language of formal analysis that would rely on accounting for what is present in the film, instead proposing a sympathy with poststructuralism's efforts at displacing the metaphysics of appearance. Violence is not what resides ready-made within the work, nor is it reducible to the realm of the visible or the audible, but is an unstable process bound up with the act of reading itself. The fragment as a formal problem holds out the abstract, general notion of a break in ways that compel a rethinking of violence as something impersonal, rhythmic, and grammatical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the works of Beckett and Coetzee, endurance in one’s being correlates to endurance in utterance. While both are relentlessly persistent, they are also constantly facing their demise and teeter on the verge of nonexistence in the form of death or the inadequacy or inability to utter. Yet it is precisely here that endurance sources its fuel: in failure and impotence, ineptitude and near-nothingness. In this article, I trace Beckett’s and Coetzee’s articulations of bringing this struggle to life and delineating how writing serves as a canvas to depict them and the means to allow them to unfold and transform in the process. Their work, I argue, commences from the premise that utterance (and writing, as one of its modalities) is, in fact, a necessity despite its frequent convergence with its impossibility. Approaching their texts from the perspective of a persevering body while also considering what subsists as the incorporeal allows for a new delineation of endurance of uttering and writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commentators agree that Derrida's criteria for an event were stringent: it had to be unique, unpredictable and unanticipatable; it must come as a surprise that defies all conceptualization, comprehension, appropriation. Can any historical occurrence pass such rigorous tests and be considered an event? The question now extends to whether Derrida's writings or life should constitute an event. This article traces Derrida's use of the word 'event' or 'événement' from 'Signature Event Context' and early readings of Nietzsche, Blanchot, and Benjamin through his 2001 paper, 'The Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event'. Analysis shows that where Derrida appears to concede the independent existence of past events this illusion is created linguistically by supplements, the future anterior tense, and speech acts. His unsuccessful attempt to exemplify 'events' that were distinguishable from merely 'what happens' assimilates them into the latter category, which he likened to 'rain', a banal, minimal catachresis of nothing. The implication is that what we call history resembles a Beckett-like condition of apparent insight that reverts, on reflection, to emptiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Desde Diferencia y repetición, Deleuze quiere liberar al espíritu de su relación con la representación. Sin embargo, este programa contenía una formulación paradójica. Deleuze propone una nueva imagen del pensamiento, la cual no es otra que la de un pensamiento sin imagen. Todo el combate en contra de “la filosofía de la representación” nos obligaba a pensar el pensamiento sin representar nada, a buscar una imagen del pensamiento que, en tanto pensamiento sin imagen, no fuera ella misma una imagen. Esta ceguera atraviesa todo el trabajo de Deleuze en los años 70, donde no encontramos ninguna teoría de la imagen, ni ninguna tentativa de construir cualquier imagen de un pensamiento sin imagen. Podríamos decir que aquello que fascinó a Deleuze en la experiencia del cine, a comienzos de los años 80, fue precisamente la posibilidad de producir imágenes del pensamiento, e imágenes de un pensamiento sin imagen. Recién en El agotado la actividad del espíritu es presentada como la creación de imágenes. Mientras que en los libros sobre cine el espíritu está sobre la pantalla, es decir, que él es el movimiento y el tiempo de las imágenes, en el análisis de las piezas para televisión de Beckett, sin embargo, el espíritu es más bien algo que se cumple en la cabeza de personajes agotados.

Review of: Thomas J. Cousineau, The Séance of Reading. Uncanny Designs in Modernist Writing, Bucharest, Bucharest University Publishing, 2023

The question of time has always been one of the greatest questions of philosophers and physicists throughout history. Undoubtedly, every philosophical thought is manifested in different forms in literary and artistic works, and among them there are writers and artists who use philosophy as the basis of their works. Samuel Beckett is one of the most influential writers in shaping the school of thought of Absurd Theater, which has its roots in philosophy. This article purports to examine and express the issue of time in the play Waiting for Godot using the ideas of Martin Heidegger. Martin Heidegger looks at the question of "time" from an ontological point of view and in his divisions, he considers "time" in both original and non-original forms for Dasein (existence). As in the play Waiting for Godot, the most important action of the play "the issue of time" is the characters' conflict in the form of two Dasein. Thus, according to Heidegger's definition of the original and non-original "time" with which Dasein is involved in life, "time" was examined as the most important element in the play Waiting for Godot. To achieve this analysis, it was first necessary to provide an exhaustive definition of "time" in the philosophical thought of Heidegger and the philosophers before him, and then by examining the issue of wait and its meaning in Heidegger's "time", the play Waiting for Godot and the characters' continuous wait were interpreted. Analytical research has been used in this study and by examining Heidegger's thoughts and Samuel Beckett's the play Waiting for Godot, and using descriptive-analytical method, it has been tried to find the common ground between Beckett's thought on writing and performing the scenes of this play and Heidegger's philosophical thoughts to shed new light on its analysis and conducting.

In this article, I propose a 'literal' interpretation of Beckett's postwar theatre, which allows to give importance to an 'aesthetic of sound' in which a work of art finds its own sense in the fact that it is a linguistic game created by an author. After 1945, the author becomes unable to speak about the profound themes of the Western tradition, but can write plays in which there is the configuration of an aesthetic of the small talk, to be analyzed according to a hermeneutics of superficiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Matéi Visniec's play Paparazzi ou La Chronique d'un lever de soleil avorté presents a vision of the end of the world, brought about by the implosion of the Sun. The action of the dramatic play focuses on the protagonists' reactions to the impending catastrophe, rather than on the apocalyptic event itself. Visniec uses the metaphor of the apocalypse as a tool to criticize society and its loss of values. He depicts how a consumer society can demoralize individuals, leading to their isolation and inability to engage in interpersonal communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of time has always been one of the greatest questions of philosophers and physicists throughout history. Undoubtedly, every philosophical thought is manifested in different forms in literary and artistic works, and among them there are writers and artists who use philosophy as the basis of their works. Samuel Beckett is one of the most influential writers in shaping the school of thought of Absurd Theater, which has its roots in philosophy. This article purports to examine and express the issue of time in the play Waiting for Godot using the ideas of Martin Heidegger. Martin Heidegger looks at the question of "time" from an ontological point of view and in his divisions, he considers "time" in both original and non-original forms for Dasein (existence). As in the play Waiting for Godot, the most important action of the play "the issue of time" is the characters' conflict in the form of two Dasein. Thus, according to Heidegger's definition of the original and non-original "time" with which Dasein is involved in life, "time" was examined as the most important element in the play Waiting for Godot. To achieve this analysis, it was first necessary to provide an exhaustive definition of "time" in the philosophical thought of Heidegger and the philosophers before him, and then by examining the issue of wait and its meaning in Heidegger's "time", the play Waiting for Godot and the characters' continuous wait were interpreted. Analytical research has been used in this study and by examining Heidegger's thoughts and Samuel Beckett's the play Waiting for Godot, and using descriptive-analytical method, it has been tried to find the common ground between Beckett's thought on writing and performing the scenes of this play and Heidegger's philosophical thoughts to shed new light on its analysis and conducting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents Samuel Beckett's television plays as images of exhaustion. It focuses on Quad 1 + 2, Ghost Trio, "but the clouds", and Nacht und Träume, which were all aired in England on the BBC and in Germany on SDR in the late-1970s and early-1980s. Exhaustion as a creative state is spontaneous, fecund and unprecedented in the forms it creates; seeming impossibilities overflow the exhausted image. Creative exhaustion also differs from fatigue, though the latter is a condition of the former. With their internal mechanics of vacuum-sealed cathode rays, electromagnets and phosphorescent glass screens, analog television sets were perfectly suited in the mid- to late-20 century to present images of exhaustion. Light radiates out from the inner core of sets. Electrically charged particles give off photons, which light the television screen from within. Beckett's television plays are images of exhaustion as surreal, overabundant presentations of impossible forms and unprecedented events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper gives a trauma reading of Krapp's Last Tape. While Krapp's inability to let go the past and his desolate lifestyle demonstrate a clear symptom of melancholia, he is unable to articulate what exactly has traumatized him nor can he mourn properly for the losses. As a result, he entombs the trauma inside of him and this hidden crypt ghosts him with obsessive or compulsive behaviors. Unaddressed trauma not only withdraws Krapp from life and others but also fragments his self into warring pieces, leaving him suffer endlessly without closure. Through Krapp's monologue of omission, evasion, and understatement, Beckett has successfully staged a trauma via absence rather than presence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Cografya Fakültesi Dergisi DTCF Dergisi is the property of Ankara Universitesi Dil ve Tarih-Cografya Fakultesi (DTCF Dergisi) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the early fifties of twentieth century following the deep break with traditional bourgeois theater, a (new) form of dramatic literature emerged in France which instead of representing its reality, tried to translate the exhaustion of the language expression that was the result of the loss of humanistic values which made it possible to ask this important philosophical question at the literary gatherings: Is the existence became meaningless and lifeless? Samuel Beckett with a deeply philosophical looking his dramatic works and pointed out the important issue "human degradation", also his concern is evidence for this important issue that human 'feels lonely and nothing in life'. In this study we will look at the meaningless of the existence and metamorphosis of Samuel Beckett's language drama, beyond the three famous plays, Waiting for Godot, End the game, Oh! Happy days. The literature that used from every possible language instrument and dramatic tools to convey the great concept of human condition with a ridiculous and humorous statement to the audience.

The Beckettian theatre describes the agony of the modern world. His character as shown in the phenomenon of his perception, even when limited to four aspects: body, items, time and the Other, let us confirm the validity of Beckett's reflections about a man who is lost, terrified and resigned to our world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Naqd Va Nazar is the property of Islamic Sciences & Culture Academy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay explores the question of why M figures in the names of all of Beckett's major characters. I connect M to the word murmuring, which proliferates in his work, and I claim that Beckett was influenced by a passage in Dante's Purgatorio, in which each face in a group of penitents is inscribed with the letter M. With a rounded eye socket below each arch, the faces of the penitents spell omo or man. I argue that M stands for man – not the humanist form of man that existed for Dante, but rather a ruined figure that is adequate to this moment. Throughout, I engage with critical approaches to Beckett that attempt to connect the posthumanism suggested in his work with the new form of ethics – and of love – that it makes possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on prosopopoeia as a “figure of the voice” in Samuel Beckett’s play for television What Where(1986/2013) and as it is defined by Bruno Clément. Prosopopoeia is a figure and a voice: both take part in the thought process. They allow the subject to think the thought process through self-hearing. Prosopopoeia is thus reflexive and participates in the phenomena of the mind which are carried out by the voice of the self, whose externalization gives way to an inner dialogue of sorts which is exposed to otherness. I will study this principle which is at the very heart of Beckett’s play along with the status of the voice. By being carried out by a figure of thought – prosopopoeia – the voice questions its origin through similarity and dissimilarity which highlights its equivocal nature. Indeed, if prosopopoeia is a figure that gives a voice to what has no existence, I will show that this voice is necessarily acousmatic.

How can an economic model designed to eliminate waste produce nothing but? The answer, according to Samuel Beckett's Watt, can be found in the system of economic relations presupposed by the Anglo-Irish Big House novels that emerged after the 1800 Acts of Union. These novels, which contrasted the profligacy and neglect of absentee English landlords with the idealized social harmony and economic self-sufficiency of the homegrown Protestant Ascendency, allowed an Anglo-Irish readership to imagine a self-sustaining body politic, invulnerable to an unevenly developed empire's devastating cycles of scarcity and waste. The Big House in Watt is the estate of Mr. Knott, to which apparently "nothing could be added... and from it nothing taken away." As his servant Watt discovers, however, the high quality of life inside the home is ensured by the continual production and export of detritus: human waste, leftover food, and pointless activity. The even-keeled manor house, moreover, lays waste to an ever-expanding network of territory and labor to feed itself. Drawing attention to the novelist's engagement with contemporary Irish economic policy, this essay shows how Beckett exploits the weaknesses of this model of national political economy to dismantle the form of the novel itself: Watt produces its own unassimilable waste in the form of aimless digressions and addenda. Rather than discard the exhausted form, as critical tradition would have it, Beckett releases his Big House novel to explore the exogenous play of wasteful contradictions and to overturn the genre's ideal equilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Among contemporary stories, Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett and Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat have a superior place. These two works, with their secretive theme, rambling structure and unbroken narratives that do not have a specific chronology, have also influenced the plot of the stories. The aim of the authors in this article is to compare the effect of the components of surrealism on Beckett's Malone Dies and Hedayat's Blind Owl . The type of research is descriptive-analytical and the method of data collection is library and note-taking. The collected material analyzed shows that Beckett and Hedayat were able to push the boundaries of the traditional plot and create a new plot by using surreal components such as: dream, autobiography, doubt and ambiguity, creating an odd and unexpected atmosphere, rupture and disorder and surreal images. Create unconventional and sometimes artistic. 2. Methodology The type of research is descriptive-analytical and the method of data collection is library and note-taking. Discussion One of the main components of the narrative in the story is the plot. Various theories have long been proposed about the importance and necessity of this basic element. Most theorists believe that the main characteristic of the plot is to create a certain kind of unity and integrity in the narrative. Before examining the plot of the two stories Malone Dies and Blind Owl, it is necessary to include basic definitions of plot in this article: the traditional and original definition of plot and plot is the same as saying: "The framework of the story based on causative relations and "Disabled" (Forrester, 2012, p. 118). In fact, this look at the plot of the story is an answer to the question of what the story was about! The plot is also "an argumentative network that gives a logical character to the story by rationally arranging and conjoining events" (Mirsadeghi, 2001, p. 64). Beckett and Hedayat in these stories, copying the surrealists, combine dream and reality so that they may be able to induce an unbalanced plot in the reader. To examine this plot in more detail, it is necessary to examine the surrealist components of the modern plot in these stories: The first and most important characteristic of surrealism is the automatic writing in a novel. Automatic writing is one of the most direct surrealism techniques for expressing inner truths in Beckett's text and guidance: "That evening life that is like going through a recovery period. Of course, if the memories are really my memories, the memories that man tastes without wandering and following the path of the sun, without discipline, or perhaps deeper than the place of the dead, in the subway corridors and the stench of the free and humiliated groups running away, they are burying themselves to arrive at the right time." (Beckett, 2010, p. 84). The author carefully intends to create a resemblance between evening life and recovery, and in the flicker of an eye, thinks that the subway corridors are deeper than the place of the dead. Doubt, which is characteristic of modern day stories, is moving through the two stories. These mental conflicts, which also happen to reflect the author's unconvinced attitude, bring the story to a standstill. Of course, the author does not seem to want to tell us what happened or is about to happen. He wants to show the impact of what happened because in modern stories, "what matters is the effect of the event on the reader, not the event itself" (Payendeh, 2010, p. 29). This mental disturbance also makes the plot irregular. Disruption and disorder is also one of the surrealist components that has disturbed the logical order in the narration of stories, and this disorder shows the struggle between the conscious and the unconscious in the psychic of the main character of the narrative. Shed: "Order is related to how the events and actions of a story are arranged in time. The narrator may present the events in the same order in which they occurred; That is, the order of the calendar, in which case the narration of the story is direct and linear or he can quote them without order; "That is, the non-calendar order, which in Genet's term is called apocalyptic, creates a nonlinear narrative" (Shakeri, 2016: 206-223). Creating a wonderful atmosphere is another type of surrealist component that has a direct effect on the plot in the stories in question: "The last night I went for a walk like every night was windy and rainy and thick fog covered around Was. "I felt a kind of freedom and comfort in the rainy weather, which reduced the vitality of colors and the vagueness of the lines of objects." (Hedayat, 1972, p. 13) The narrator has created a wonderful atmosphere by imagining a rainy and cloudy weather, the presence of thick fog, the vibrancy of colors and the indecency of the lines of objects, etc., in which he has reached a kind of freedom and comfort. Another influential surrealist component of the plot of Malone Dies and Blind Owl is the dream and the association of the dream. This association of dreams in the two stories is so clear that it can be said that reason and logic are somehow wandering in their space. The last important component is the surrealist images, which are different from the images in realist works: "The surrealist text is shattered and scattered because of surrealist images like dreams" (Shamisa, 2011, p. 175). These images are the creators of impossibilities and disruptors of rational and logical systems that create surprise and wonder and separation from the real world in addition to expressing the purpose, create a special attraction in the mind of the audience. Exactly the same images as in the text of these two stories; The story begins with a logical word, but after narrating a few lines, the narrator describes a nightmare that shows him wandering in a world between reality and dream; The world and the horrible images that are born of the author's imagination and delusion, and in which the real, fixed and identical elements do not remain. Conclusion Important surrealist components are persuasive in shaping the plot structure of Malone Dies and Blind Owl, which include: automatic writing, ambiguity, rupture and disorder, the creation of a wonderful atmosphere, dreams and surreal images. In these stories, the sequence of images that the narrator sees in reality or fantasy advance the plot of the story, rather than the causal connection and sequence of the scenes. In general, it should be noted that Beckett and Hedayat, by breaking with tradition, have opened a new perspective in modern storytelling by following the modernists by creating an unusual plot in their stories.

Starting from Nicholas Zurbrugg's dismissal of the negative 'B-Effect' in postmodernism, which he associates with 'Benjamin, Brecht, Beckett, Barthes, Baudrillard, and Bourdieu', this essay examines the common rationale behind convergent affirmations of a neutrality or minimalism, often mistaken for nihilism, at key junctures in the works of Samuel Beckett and Roland Barthes, adding Maurice Blanchot as a critical link. The argument unfolds along a double axis: it first considers the formal role of 'chatter' or 'idle speech' and the fragment(ary in writing) in the three 'B-writers' before relating them to different constructions of temporality, such as the 'future anterior' and the après-coup, in their thematizations of 'catastrophe' and 'disaster' as indirect responses to personal or historical trauma and death. A brief concluding paragraph highlights how time's suspensiveness leads to different forms of waiting across Barthes, Blanchot and Beckett. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article brings together Roland Barthes and Samuel Beckett into a dialogue devoid of hierarchy, with Jacques Lacan as mediator. Both writers were intent on escaping the sway of the image considered as formatted by meanings. For Barthes, the themes of love and photography point to the existence of unicity within the dispersal of meanings and the reality of loss. Rather than undoing the image like Barthes, Beckett starts from an inaugural absence of instituted reality: from an original absence of any 'that-has-been', as expressed in the motif of the mask. Both authors locate vision within speech, and the alterity contained within the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Calm is a little-theorized but important link between Roland Barthes and Samuel Beckett. Beginning with Beckett, moving on to Barthes, and then interleaving the two, this paper proposes calm as a 'scandalous' category not reducible to kindred states like languor or apatheia. In dialogue with theorists of repose, such as Kant and De Quincey, calmness becomes less a sedated condition than an interactive process, entailing intense sensitivity to the fluctuations of what Barthes calls 'the affective minimal'. Artistically generative, this 'emotive lucidity' encourages inquisitiveness towards the natural world, and enables in both writers specific writing practices — from lists to notation to haiku. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay develops a tense relation between Samuel Beckett and Roland Barthes over their treatment of breath. If Barthes's lovers come together through a shared breath, breaths pull Beckett's couples apart. How then might breath bring Beckett and Barthes together, so they might be close but not too close? The essay first discards the idea of using a single understanding of breath by showing how the localized instances of breath in Beckett and Barthes do not scale up to a coherent, synthetic concept. Then, by turning to works that play with the problems of metanarrative, Beckett's How It Is (1961–4) and Barthes's A Lover's Discourse (1977–8), it shows how breath becomes a possible means of reading these two texts together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the world of theatre from within and beyond the stage and brings together Roland Barthes as a critic and Samuel Beckett as a playwright via a third character, the Romanian-born playwright Eugène Ionesco, who anathematized the former and admired the latter. The article starts from Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), which defined Beckett's and Ionesco's art, pointing out that whilst Esslin showed why their works produced 'bewilderment' in England and the US, he ignored the Paris debates of the 1950s to early 1960s. It then covers the intricate history of Barthes's polemical articles on avant-garde theatre and focuses on Barthes hailing Bertolt Brecht as an innovator who redefined theatre as belonging to a community. The next section engages with Beckett's and Ionesco's ideas on staging and their relation to Brecht and the Brechtians. The epilogue proposes a reading of Ionesco's satirical play Improvisation or the Shepherd's Chameleon (1955), which features Barthes and two other representatives of nouvelle critique as characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article stages a dialogue between Roland Barthes and Samuel Beckett by characterizing and comparing their tendencies to indulge in doodles and drawings, both of which have been the subject of increased critical interest (and even public exhibition) in recent years. Surveying such recent criticism, the article begins by connecting Barthes's and Beckett's respective ways of drawing to theoretical and aesthetic concerns of their writing. Then, developing the complementary manual metaphors of legerdemain (sleight of hand, manual skill) and gaucherie (left-handedness, awkwardness), the article draws from currents in genetic criticism, New Materialism and 'weak theory' to suggest ways in which reading doodles might inform ways of reading texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Roland Barthes never wrote a play, 'theatre' or related terms such as 'scenario' or 'theatricality' recur throughout his oeuvre from the 1950s to the late 1970s. He wrote many reviews of theatre, but theatre and performance also became integral to much of the theoretical concerns of his later work. During this same period, Samuel Beckett's dramaturgy was evolving from his first full-length play, Eleutheria, to the later 'dramaticules' such as Not I, which premiered in 1973. Barthes did comment on Beckett a few times in his theatre criticism, mainly in relation to En attendant Godot or avant-garde theatre, but there is little overt interchange between them. However, this essay creates a series of 'dialogues' by juxtaposing selected plays from different moments in Beckett's dramaturgical evolution with different moments in Barthes's writings about theatre: firstly, the reaction against and deconstruction of post-war mainstream French theatre; secondly, theatre's engagement with history; and thirdly, performance as a paradigm and site for staging multiple versions of the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writers, readers, critics all have strong personal preferences. Roland Barthes was a case in point. Many were the texts he chose to affirm. Others he rejected, while some were left to hover in the margins of his thinking. Still others barely feature at all, among which, conspicuous by their absence, are the novels and plays of Samuel Beckett. This article examines the political, theoretical and affective reasons for Barthes's apparent indifference to a writer who, despite early hostility on the part of the literary establishment, came to be seen as the abiding embodiment of late modernity. It contrasts Barthes's limited response to Beckett with that of another leading critic of the period, Maurice Blanchot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Beckett's late "closed space" works are characterized by the experience of confinement. This article revisits Mal vu mal dit (1981), focusing on two dimensions of the text that have characterized experiences of the current pandemic: confinement and confusion. I explore these notions and their productive co-existence in the text: firstly, the experience of the enclosed, disturbing spaces of the cabin that are repeatedly described, as well as the mental space from which narration emerges, the "manicome du crâne" or madhouse of the skull. Secondly, I consider the disorderly mingling of past and present, reality and imaginary, perception and language, that structures the text and characterizes our engagement with it. The austere picture of existence that emerges is tempered by poetic patterning and allusion that point to a (literary) possibility of solace beyond the brutality of the present. The radical challenges posed by this writing mean that it cannot represent a sustainable "new normal" for narrative fiction. Nevertheless, drawing on Beckett's letters and informed by Milan Kundera and others, my reading proposes ways in which the confinement and confusion of Mal vu mal dit intensify our engagement with the processes and possibilities of narrative practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patrick Magee was Samuel Beckett's close collaborator and friend who, through his monologues on BBC radio in the early 1960s, shaped the parameters of a generic Beckettian character. It has been estimated that these classic early broadcasts, taking place over a relatively short period, reached audiences far in excess of any of the other avenues available to Beckett at the time. Yet it has not been sufficiently understood that Magee's performances emerge from a wide and shifting field of biographical, aesthetic, professional and economic forces. Magee's distinctive realization of Beckett's voices took place in a context of his sustained experiment with the nature and function of character across several media, and in what follows I want to think through the nature and consequences of this mobility. To do so I will focus on his career from 1958 to 1964, that is to say, from the small part he played in the first airing of Beckett's play All that Fall on the BBC Third Programme, to the Royal Shakespeare Company summer season at the Aldwych in London, which featured Magee as the leading man in all four plays staged, including Beckett's Endgame and Peter Weiss' Marat/Sade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on the functions of detailed analyses and pedantic explanations of situations and events provided by Kafka’s characters. Taken together, they create the impression of a solid orientation within the system. Nevertheless, the more elaborate and compact they are, the more they make it clear that the system, by its very nature, resists understanding. The incomprehensibility of the world, amplified by explanations, implies the inextricability of guilt (in analogy to Quine’s inextricability of meaning): it is impossible to identify those elements of the protagonist’s biography which constitute his guilt and separate them from the “innocent” rest.he article overviews the evolution of The Art of Translation by Jiří Levý starting with the genesis of the original Czech version, which can be considered the culmination of the author’s academic career. The first foreign languages the book was translated into were German and Russian. Since the Czech original was strongly imbedded in the Czech culture and literature, the translation required adaptations to the target cultures. The paper aims to trace the translation process of Levý’s publication with the main focus on its German version. Together with the Czech original, this version served as the basis for the second Czech edition. the final part of the article focuses on the international reception of Levý’s masterpiece and introduces its recent translations into foreign languages.

This essay analyses Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy and Waiting for Godot through the enabling theoretical lens of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. Special attention shall be paid to key Heideggerian concepts: idle talk, authenticity, and inauthenticity. A Heideggerian reading of Beckett’s influential middle period allows for a rich exploration of how his works provide a vision of the psychological state of the formerly powerful Anglo-Irish in post-independence Ireland. A Beckettian reading of Heidegger demonstrates how Heideggerian thought has been at the forefront of elucidating key challenges posed in the Twentieth Century concerning ways of being-in-the-world and being-with-others that allows for the authenticity of individual subjectivities.

Beckettian justice avoids the usual scripts of judicial processes: his trials and punishments merge, as his captive characters lock themselves into eerily repetitive, self-questioning loops of semi-existence. His prison-cell courtrooms critique the wider socio-cultural symbolism associated with indefinite incarceration and unduly harsh sentences, questioning whether retributive sanctions have the power to redeem, or to spark atonement. By turning vague but terrifying recollections into accusatory witness statements, Beckett crafts purgatories grounded in endless perception. Audiences must therefore act as jurors and gaolers: by witnessing the various "crimes" of omission (neglect, abandonment, unintentional cruelty) we are perhaps better placed to judge our own failings and frailties and capacity for resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The results of a comparative analysis of the story “Notes from the Underground” by F. M. Dostoevsky and the works of S. Beckett are presented in the article. It is shown how Beckett critically interprets the main novels of the Russian writer. The novelty of the work is seen in the fact that the problem of Beckett as the “heir” of Dostoevsky and his “Notes from the Underground” is considered in Russian literary criticism for almost the fi time. Based on the plays “Waiting for Godot”, “All that Fall”, the novel “Molloy” and the story “First Love”, the author demonstrates how Dostoevsky’s themes, motives and images are refracted in Beckett’s work. Particular attention is paid to the motive of “underground” love. A similarity was found between Dostoevsky’s story and Beckett’s works in spatial and temporal characteristics (uncertainty of the scene, nonlinearity of time, repetition of situations). It has been proven that these characteristics serve to designate a world without God, in which landmarks and goals are lost, positive and rational foundations are broken. It has been established that for Dostoevsky the Underground remains a “dark corner” behind which there is a “big world”, while for Beckett it fi the whole world.

Literary studies have usually interpreted Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (1959) to reflect an area void of meaning and inaccessible to representation. The present article, by contrast, argues that Beckett experientially communicates archaic psychic reality where certain contents develop in an interpersonal relationship. The article offers psychoanalytical close readings of a few key passages in the text, where the function that is integrated in the narrative voice and actively destroys connections manifests itself on different textual levels. Using the psychoanalyst Avner Bergstein’s interpretation of Wilfred Bion’s concept, “attacks on linking”, as a paradoxical form of communication, the article argues that the narrative voice wishes to communicate – at a (non-symbolic) primitive level of projective identification – exactly the theme that is central to his psyche, that is, his tendency to destroy any link that connects an object to another object. The article opens up questions on how interpretations of a certain kind narrow the other’s psychic experience rather than give it liberty of movement. Beckett’s work brings to the fore the question what possibilities exist to meet the other from within the inner world when the other specifically tries to destroy this attempt at meeting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creativity does not specific only the history of the disciplines of spirit. It also defines normality itself to the extent to which normality is given to man who, at best, to use a term coined by the creator of psychosomatic medicine, Viktor von Wiezsäcker, is stricken by normopathie. After a defining meeting with Freud, he published a research in Die Kreatur magazine demonstrating that, as long as it is to be found "exiled on earth", in its minor and pathological meaning, the "creature" is synonym with suffering. For psychoanalysis, in its major opposite meaning, the therapeutic one, the following is implied: how much creativity so much normality. Given this context, the major theoretical and practical plus that Lacan brings in addition to Freud is represented by the possibility of treatment for psychosis using what he coined as the "substitute". His seminar titled Le Sinthome is entirely focused on the manner in which James Joyce could "substitute" his psychosis through the recursive act of his own creativity. The recursion to creation can substitute the recurrence of psychosis. In this paper we argue the importance and function of the substitute in Samuel Becket's case - he was, for a while, Joyce's personal secretary. After a schizophrenic episode followed by an analysis with Wilfred Bion, Beckett managed not only to find substitution in and through his work, but also to provide some important indications for the therapy of this serious condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sometimes a theatrical production comes along that illuminates a familiar text, bringing parts of the story into a new focus or revealing other parts hitherto unseen. The Endgame Project, conceived by veteran New York actors Dan Moran and John Christopher Jones, is one of these productions. In this conception of Samuel Beckett's Endgame, Clov and Hamm, two characters with diminishing physical abilities, are played by Jones and Moran, two seasoned actors who are both living with Parkinson's disease. The Endgame Project creates a powerful joining of Beckett's script and the Parkinson's disease that holds the principal actors in its grip. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the intersection between posthumanism and ecological thought in Beckett's Endgame. Based on a reception-informed approach, this article revisits Beckett's Endgame with a special focus on how the recent context of pandemic affects our reading of the human in his work. Building on the existing body of critical response to Beckett's re-evaluation of the human, we particularly contend that Beckett's conception of the (post)human as a molecular being overcomes the humanist notion of human sovereignty and affirms, instead, continuity and relatedness of all lifeforms. We further want to argue that the metaphor of molecular (d)evolution evoked in Endgame undermines the unity of the self-contained subject and serves as a basis for an ethical response to the human and nonhuman other. To explicate this molecular vision, we examine how the play's metaphorical engagement with cross-species contagion undermines humans' claims to species exceptionalism and allows for inter-species connections. In this connection, we seek to align Beckett's apocalypse in Endgame with Colebrook's conception of the apocalypse as an 'inhuman event,' with 'a sense of a certain mode of humanity reaching its end and giving way to other forms.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vanishing Points in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Work In his dramatic work, Samuel Beckett enhances the physical characteristics of the stage and the stage play. The performance space interferes with the dramatic space, the abstract space of the story acted out on the stage, a story which always begins, and it maintains a special relationship to the characters, thus giving a new dimension between fiction and performance. The tensions caused by the plastic treatment of those spaces seem to be leading to multiple interpretations: choreographic space, geometric, abstract, symbolic and so forth. Equivalently, in Beckett’s drama, dramatic space is related to the outside world and causes a reflection depicting what is easily recognizable as well as that which is difficult to interpret. The tensions accommodated arouse the need to consider it primarily as a play/performance space; as the space for acting, yet they also arouse the necessity to explore its relationship with the characters, the story of the play etc. In this perspective, these spaces are related to the limited stage representation (a spot-lit mouth, for example, appears detached speaking in the darkness in “Not I”). Localization is always an element of the stage. Here and elsewhere (the stage and the world) are reduced to their most profound limit. The stage appears as the place of performance and the development of the fictional story, as well as encompassing the existence and the incarnation of strange characters. This limited stage space inevitably constitutes the bedrock of theatrical action, where different tensions are spread and orchestrated in it. The stage can be explored through the movement of the various elements which have a plastic dimension such as the body, the light, the voice. At the same time, the stage accommodates their tensions. The meaning of these interactions is complex. This performance space is in a perpetual state of modeling that continues to refer to an outside reality which in turn is always brought into the play. This is not a simple interaction between spaces, techniques, theatrical mechanisms; but a set which always brings back to the performance space, the vanishing points of which are in constant interaction.

Malgré leur nature fragmentaire et souvent inachevée, les textes de Celati consacrés aux arts visuels témoignent d’une étonnante cohérence et d’une non moins étonnante concordance avec la pensée esthétique de leur auteur, tant dans leurs lignes générales que dans leurs évolutions. L’article offre un survol des principaux écrits théoriques que Celati a consacré, depuis les années 1970, au problème de l’art et de la peinture : par l’analyse de ces textes, on tente de montrer comment les liens entre image et écriture littéraire sont indissociables chez cet auteur.

El análisis comparativo de dos obras del artista multidisciplinario Samuel Beckett —El innombrable (texto literario) y No yo (video-arte y pieza teatral)—, de sus declaraciones y de la obra de dos escritores que influenciaron su trabajo (James Joyce y Stéphane Mallarmé) nos llevará a distinguir en el proceso creativo de Beckett la constitución de una investigación artística (sin fronteras disciplinares) comprometida con una idea precisa de arte y con un proyecto artístico radical que marcarán de manera singular todo su proceso y su devenir sujeto-artista.

This article regards the semantic realization of the hat motif on the material of the Beckett’s French-language short stories («La fin», «Premier amour» «L’expulsé»). Being diverse, the hat motif is highly related to the other motifs and thus provides the coherence and integration of the author’s literary world. The article also analyses the connection between hat motif and the major themes of Beckett’s writing which synthesizes existentialphilosophical and personal aspects.

In this article I argue that Adorno's dialectical principle that reason and nature co-constitute each other is evidenced in Beckett's novel Molloy. Adorno argues that reason regresses to myth – that is, it becomes irrational and reified – in modernity; and that, conversely, myth shows itself to be rational – that is, myth reveals that it has already inhabited enlightenment. In Molloy, Moran relies on dubious positive metaphysical principles in an attempt to spiritualise his bees; however, such spiritualisation leads directly to their death, because his experience of the bees is undialectical and static. Thus instead of the uncritical reproduction of conventional metaphysical principles, metaphysics must show itself to be damaged by historical events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]