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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]