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“You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.” These are some of the most quoted lines written by Samuel Beckett, which speak to the impulse of persevering in times of crisis and impossibility. Yet few readers of Beckett agree about what this paradoxical formula could mean, let alone what mode of engagement it would seem to indicate, be it committed, autonomous, or something else entirely. This volume of essays explores what that mode of engagement could be, all the while elucidating the ethical and political stakes of the “ongoing” in both Beckett's life and work. Across multiple disciplines in the humanities, the authors delve into questions of political subjectivity and representation, the ethics of powerlessness and refusal, the aesthetics of syncopation and destitution, multimedia experiments between genre, as well as Beckett's wider impact on transnational itineraries of modernism and philosophy up to the contemporary.

'The danger is in the neatness of identifications', Samuel Beckett famously stated, and, at first glance, no two authors could be further distant from one another than William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett. This book addresses the vast intertextual network between the works of both writers and explores the resonant correspondences between them. It analyses where and how these resonances manifest themselves in their aesthetics, theatre, language and form. It traces convergences and inversions across both œuvres that resound beyond their conditions of production and possibility. Uncovering hitherto unexplored relations between the texts of an early modern and a late modern author, this study seeks to offer fresh readings of single passages and entire works, but it will also describe productive tensions and creative incongruences between them.

Clem Beckett was fourteen when he first rode a homemade motorcycle over the cobbled streets of his hometown. It was the start of a lifelong love affair with speed and machines. For Beckett, the motorbike was a means of escape from the uncertain future of Oldham's stricken industries in the aftermath of the First World War. Beckett's zest for life, his natural exuberance and determination to be a winner, overcame the disadvantages of a poor home bereft of a father. As a pioneering Dirt Track (speedway) rider he broke records galore, and as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War he broke down class barriers. Whether as a tearaway teenager, an outspoken sportsman, or a member of the Communist Party, his life was characterized by broadsides of irreverence towards authority. To Beckett, the appeal of revolutionary politics was youthful rejection of ‘old fogey'values and the dominating role of of tweedy gentility in motorcycle sport. Reviving faded memories and anecdotes of his career as a pioneer speedway rider, this book traces Beckett's extraordinary rise from blacksmith's apprentice to superstar, in a new sport which typified the energy of the Roaring Twenties, and was characterised by risk-taking and serial injury. Ever the showman, and banned from the Dirt Track for trying to protect his fellow riders from exploitation, Beckett took to riding the Wall of Death. Observing the rise of fascism on his travels in Europe, Beckett's increasing involvement with politics led to marriage to the mysterious Lida Henriksen, and inexorably to volunteer service in the British Battalion of the International Brigades in Spain. A narrative spiced with anecdotes and new revelations about Beckett shows why from boyhood to the poignant circumstances of his death in battle, Clem Beckett inspired love and loyalty.

A book on the experience of reading the works of Samuel Beckett. After a life of writing about Victorian novelists, Rosemarie Bodenheimer found herself entranced by the work of Samuel Beckett. In this book she shares her journey of discovery with readers who may or may not be familiar with Beckett's novels and stories. She follows his trajectory from the first unpublished novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, through the great post-war trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, and on to the ever more experimental inventions in the shorter, later fictions, and monologues. Through readings of his work alongside extracts from his published correspondence, Beckett emerges as a sympathetic human figure, a poet of productive doubt, and a brilliant stylist of mood changes and second thoughts. Bodenheimer considers Beckett's treatments of memory, nostalgia, and grief, and the forms he finds to convey those essential human experiences while avoiding melodrama or sentimentality. His dramatized relationship with his own writing is a crucial part of that emotional landscape. His playful jousts with the conventions of novel-writing show how, from the start, Beckett challenged the notion of character and other inherited novel conventions. The book also emphasizes his dismantling of the autobiographical'I'his moving narratives of attachment and loss, and the inimitable mixture of comedy and pathos he creates by inventing outlandish situations to which his characters respond in very recognizable human ways.

This is the first monograph to analyse Beckett's use of the visual arts, music, and broadcasting media through a transdisciplinary approach. It considers how Beckett's complex and varied use of art, music, and media in a selection of his novels, radio plays, teleplays, and later short prose informs his creative process. Investigating specific instances where Beckett's writing adopts musical or visual structures, Lucy Jeffery identifies instances of Beckett's transdisciplinarity and considers how this approach to writing facilitates ways of expressing familiar Beckettian themes of abstraction, ambiguity, longing, and endlessness. With case studies spanning forty years, she evaluates Beckett's stylistic shifts in relation to the cultural context, particularly the technological advancements and artistic movements, during which they were written. With new examples from Beckett's notebooks, critical essays, and letters, Transdisciplinary Beckett evidences how the drastic changes that took place in the visual arts and in musical composition influenced Beckett and, in turn, were influenced by him. Transdisciplinary Beckett situates Beckett as a key figure not just in the literary marketplace but also in the fields of music, art, and broadcasting.

For a long time, analysis of the work of Samuel Beckett has been dominated by existentialist and post-structuralist interpretations. This new volume instead raises the question of how to understand Beckett via the dialectics underpinning his work. The different chapters explore how Beckett exposes and challenges essential dialectical concepts such as objectivity, subjectivity, exteriority, interiority, immanence, transcendence, and most crucially: negativity. With contributions from prominent scholars such as Alain Badiou, Mladen Dolar, and Rebecca Comay, Beckett and Dialectics not only sheds new light on how Beckett investigates the shapes, types, and forms of negation – as in the all-pervasive figures of'nothing','no','null', and'not'– but also examines how several phenomena that occur throughout Beckett's work are structured in their use of negativity. These include the relationships between voice and silence, space and void, movement and stasis, the finite and the infinite and repetition and transformation. This original analysis lends an important new perspective to Beckett studies, and even more fundamentally, to dialectics itself.

“Katherine Weiss'Simply Beckett is a beautifully written book, one brimming with fresh critical insights. What is obvious is her utter command of her material. As part of the Simply Charly series, the book is designed for university students and theatergoers, but, in fact, it also appeals to scholars long familiar with Beckett's work. Drawing on history, politics, trauma, and memory, Weiss leads the reader through Beckett's plays in clear, engaging prose. In sum, Weiss'book has the reach and depth to make it one of the more important coordinates in Beckett scholarship.”—Matthew Roudané, Regents'Professor of English and Theater, Georgia State University Born in Dublin on Good Friday, Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) attended Trinity College and taught briefly in Belfast before moving to Paris, where he lived for most of his adult life. Deeply influenced by James Joyce, who became a close friend and mentor, he published poetry, novels, essays, and reviews before stunning Paris, and eventually the rest of the world, with his play Waiting for Godot in 1953. Famously described by one critic as “a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats,” Godot redefined dramatic structure and showcased Beckett's commitment to an art based on the ideas of “non-knowing” and powerlessness. In Simply Beckett, professor Katherine Weiss provides a highly accessible and insightful introduction to the award-winning author and his paradoxical works, with a particular focus on Beckett's theater activities, both as a writer and director. Through discussion of the written texts, significant productions of the plays, and audience and critical reactions to Beckett's work, Weiss helps the reader understand the groundbreaking nature of his achievements and points the way toward a greater appreciation of his oeuvre. Combining admirable erudition with reader-friendly style, Simply Beckett is a fascinating journey into the world of an author whose work went to the heart of the human condition.

Beckett and Buddhism undertakes a twenty-first-century reassessment of the Buddhist resonances in Samuel Beckett's writing. These reverberations, as Angela Moorjani demonstrates, originated in his early reading of Schopenhauer. Drawing on letters and archives along with recent studies of Buddhist thought and Schopenhauer's knowledge of it, the book charts the Buddhist concepts circling through Beckett's visions of the'human predicament'in a blend of tears and laughter. Moorjani offers an in-depth elucidation of texts that are shown to intersect with the negative and paradoxical path of the Buddha, which she sets in dialogue with Western thinking. She brings further perspectives from cognitive philosophy and science to bear on creative emptiness, the illusory'I', and Beckett's probing of the writing process. Readers will benefit from this far-reaching study of one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century who explored uncharted topologies in his fiction, theatre, and poetry.

Reveals how the body in Beckett, embedded in its material environment, exhibits embodied agency.

This collection of essays reveals the extent to which politics is fundamental to our understanding of Samuel Beckett's life and writing. Bringing together internationally established and emerging scholars, Beckett and Politics considers Beckett's work as it relates to three broad areas of political discourse: language politics, biopolitics and geopolitics. Through a range of critical approaches, including performance studies, political theory, gender theory, historicizing approaches and language theory, the book demonstrates how politics is more than just another thematic lens: it is fundamentally and structurally intrinsic to Beckett's life, his texts and subsequent interpretations of them. This important collection of essays demonstrates that Beckett's work is not only ripe for political engagement, but also contains significant opportunities for understanding and illuminating the broader relationships between literature, culture and politics.

In this fascinating new exploration of Samuel Beckett’s work, Pascale Casanova argues that Beckett’s reputation rests on a pervasive misreading of his oeuvre, which neglects entirely the literary revolution he instigated. Reintroducing the historical into the heart of this body of work, Casanova provides an arresting portrait of Beckett as radically subversive—doing for writing what Kandinsky did for art—and in the process presents the key to some of the most profound enigmas of Beckett’s writing.

When Samuel Beckett's work first appeared, it was routinely described, by Adorno amongst others, as a clear example of European high culture. However, this judgement ignored an aspect of Beckett's work and its reception that is, arguably, not yet fully understood; the intimate relation between his work and popular culture. Beckett used popular cultural forms; but popular culture has also found a place both for the work and for the man. This collection of essays examines how popular cultural forms and media are woven into the fabric of Beckett's works, and how Beckett continues to have far-reaching impact on popular culture today in a host of different forms, in film and on television, from comics to meme culture, tourism to marketing.

‘Dialogues on Beckett'is a collection of 12 conversations about 12 plays by Samuel Beckett, discussions about the meaning of life and the universe between an agnostic and a Christian, based on a close reading of the text. It is also based on the thesis that Beckett's main concern in his plays is Christian theology or, more broadly, the religious interpretation of the world. All his plays are an argument with that interpretation; in particular, they question the idea of theodicy and the philosophy of consolation. The aim of ‘Dialogues on Beckett'is to make the reader aware of this essential theme in the playwright's work, to interpret it in this light and to show his original approach to the subject. Beckett argues that we live in a post-Christian era. But for him this knowledge is no reason for joy; rather, it is a source of sadness, fear and even despair.

This book of collected essays approaches Beckett's work through the context of modernism, while situating it in the literary tradition at large. It builds on current debates aiming to redefine ‘modernism'in connection to concepts such as ‘late modernism'or ‘postmodernism'. Instead of definitively re-categorizing Beckett under any of these labels, the essays use his diverse oeuvre – encompassing poetry, criticism, prose, theatre, radio and film – as a case study to investigate and reassess the concept of ‘modernism after postmodernism'in all its complexity, covering a broad range of topics spanning Beckett's entire career. In addition to more thematic essays about art, history, politics, psychology and philosophy, the collection places his work in relation to that of other modernists such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, as well as to the literary canon in general. It represents an important contribution to both Beckett studies and modernism studies.

The Beckett Cypher collection of novels begins with The Case – Book 1, a contemporary criminal investigation, layered with romance, love, intrigue, friendship, family, corruption, and choices. The Case begins when undercover operative Shane Beckett is contracted by the Carson City Sheriff to investigate a crime family syndicate, and the syndicate's links to drug cartels and politicians. Shane is quickly swept up in two murders, as he falls deeply in love with the woman of his dreams, in the middle of the investigation. But just as he comes to realize that The Case is far more complex than he could have imagined, and he himself becomes a target for assassination, he also learns his new love and her family are far more than they first appeared. As he enters the depths of the underworld, Shane becomes entangled with people responsible for his parents'murders, an unknown assassin, warring drug cartels, and a shadow government. Shane must quickly make complex and difficult choices as The Case drags in additional people, more danger, building intrigue, and a passionate love he had never known possible. He struggles to maintain control of The Case and his life, as he identifies a barrage of people and motives. Shane finally discovers he can't begin to unravel these mysteries until he finds the key that will unlock the past – The Beckett Cypher.

Revisioning Beckett reassesses Beckett's career and literary output, particularly his engagement with what might be called decadent modernism. Gontarski approaches Beckett from multiple viewpoints: from his running afoul of the Irish Censorship of Publications Acts in the 1930s through the 1950s, his preoccupations to “find literature in the pornography, or beneath the pornography,” his battles with the Lord Chamberlain in the mid-1950s over London stagings of his first two plays, and his close professional and personal associations with publishers who celebrated the work of the demimonde. Much of that term encompasses an opening to the fullness of human experience denied in previous centuries, and much of that has been sexual or decadent. As Gontarski shows, the aesthetics that emerges from such early career encounters and associations continues to inform Beckett's work and develops into experimental modes that upend literary models and middle-class values, an aesthetics that, furthermore, has inspired any number of visual artists to re-vision Beckett.

Collected essays from a symposium held in April 1974, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, this volume analyzes Beckett's philosophy, rhetoric, poetry, and novels.

Surreal Beckett situates Beckett‘s writings within the context of James Joyce and Surrealism, distinguishing ways in which Beckett forged his own unique path, sometimes in accord with, sometimes at odds with, these two powerful predecessors. Beckett was so deeply enmeshed in Joyce's circle during his early Paris days (1928 - late 1930s) that James Knowlson dubbed them his'Joyce years.'But Surrealism and Surrealists rivaled Joyce for Beckett's early and continuing attention, if not affection, so that Raymond Federman called 1929-45 Beckett's'surrealist period.'Considering both claims, this volume delves deeper into each argument by obscuring the boundaries between theses differentiating studies. These received wisdoms largely maintain that Beckett's Joycean connection and influence developed a negative impact in his early works, and that Beckett only found his voice when he broke the connection after Joyce's death. Beckett came to accept his own inner darkness as his subject matter, writing in French and using a first-person narrative voice in his fiction and competing personal voices in his plays. Critics have mainly viewed Beckett's Surrealist connections as roughly co-terminus with Joycean ones, and ultimately of little enduring consequence. Surreal Beckett argues that both early influences went much deeper for Beckett as he made his own unique way forward, transforming them, particularly Surrealist ones, into resources that he drew upon his entire career. Ultimately, Beckett endowed his characters with resources sufficient to transcend limitations their surreal circumstances imposed upon them.

Representing a profound engagement with the work of Samuel Beckett, this volume gathers the very best of Stan Gontarski's Beckett criticism on practical, theoretical and critical levels. Such a range suggests a multiplicity of approaches to a body of work itself multiple, produced by an artist who underwent any number of transformations and reinventions over his long writing career.　Many of the essays collected here explore Beckett's debt to his age, Beckett very much a product of a culture in transition, which change he would help foster. But much of Beckett's creative struggle was to find a new way, his own way.　Most of the essays that comprise this volume detail that struggle, toward a way we now call Beckettian.

Der Poetik Becketts widmet diese Einführung ein ausführliches Kapitel. In einzelnen Werkanalysen verfolgt der Autor die konsequente Verwirklichung seines poetologischen Vorhabens und benennt die zahlreichen intertextuellen Bezüge u.a. auf die'Göttliche Komödie', den'Faust'und'Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung'. Der Band stellt sämtliche bisher veröffentlichten Theaterstücke, Hörspiele und Fernsehspiele vor und berücksichtigt auch die aktuellste Forschungsliteratur.

Deleuze and Beckett is a collection of essays on specific aspects of the Deleuze and Beckett interface. Some of the world's leading Beckett and Deleuze specialists apply different concepts of Deleuzian philosophy to a wide range of Beckett's oeuvre, including his novels, short stories, and stage, film and television work.

This collection of essays, most of which return to or renew something of an empirical or archival approach to the issues, represents the most comprehensive analysis of Beckett's relationship to philosophy in print, how philosophical issues, conundrums, and themes play out amid narrative intricacies. The volume is thus both an astonishingly comprehensive overview and a series of detailed readings of the intersection between philosophical texts and Samuel Beckett's oeuvre, offered by a plurality of voices and bookended by an historical introduction and a thematic conclusion.?S. E. Gontarski, Journal of Beckett Studies This is an important contribution to ongoing attempts to understand the relationship of Beckett's work to philosophy. It breaks some new ground, and helps us to consider not only how Beckett made use of philosophy but how his own thought might be understood philosophical.?Anthony Uhlmann, University of Western Sydney

'Beckett criticism has been greatly enhanced, and sometimes chastened, by genetic scholarship, as this anthology... attests.'—Andre Furlani, Modernism/Modernity'This collection of essays... represents the most comprehensive analysis of Beckett's relationship to philosophy in print, how philosophical issues, conundrums, and themes play out amid narrative intricacies. The volume is thus both an astonishingly comprehensive overview and a series of detailed readings of the intersection between philosophical texts and Samuel Beckett's oeuvre, offered by a plurality of voices and bookended by an historical introduction and a thematic conclusion.'—S. E. Gontarski, Journal of Beckett Studies'Helps us to consider not only how Beckett made use of philosophy but how his own thought might be understood philosophically.'—Anthony Uhlmann, University of Western Sydney

The dozen essays brought together here, alongside a newly-written introduction, contextualize and exemplify the recent'empirical turn'in Beckett studies. Characterized, above all, by recourse to manuscript materials in constructing revisionist interpretations, this approach has helped to transform the study of Samuel Beckett over the past generation. In addition to focusing upon Beckett's early immersion in philosophy and psychology, other chapters similarly analyze his later collaboration with the BBC through the lens of literary history. Falsifying Beckett thus offers new readings of Beckett by returning to his archive of notebooks, letters, and drafts. In reassessing key aspects of his development as one of the 20th century's leading artists, this collection is of interest to all students of Beckett's writing as well as'historicist'scholars and critics of modernism more generally.

Discussion concerning the'musicality'of Samuel Beckett's writing now constitutes a familiar critical trope in Beckett Studies, one that continues to be informed by the still-emerging evidence of Beckett's engagement with music throughout his personal and literary life, and by the ongoing interest of musicians in Beckett's work. In Beckett's drama and prose writings, the relationship with music plays out in implicit and explicit ways. Several of his works incorporate canonical music by composers such as Schubert and Beethoven. Other works integrate music as a compositional element, in dialogue or tension with text and image, while others adopt rhythm, repetition and pause to the extent that the texts themselves appear to be'scored'. But what, precisely, does it mean to say that a piece of prose or writing for theatre, radio or screen, is'musical'? The essays included in this book explore a number of ways in which Beckett's writings engage with and are engaged by musicality, discussing familiar and less familiar works by Beckett in detail. Ranging from the scholarly to the personal in their respective modes of response, and informed by approaches from performance and musicology, literary studies, philosophy, musical composition and creative practice, these essays provide a critical examination of the ways we might comprehend musicality as a definitive and often overlooked attribute throughout Beckett's work.

'While the writing of Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973) is renowned for its linguistic and narrative proliferation, the best-known works of Samuel Beckett (1906-89) are minimalist, with a clear fondness for subtraction and abstraction. Despite these face-value differences, a close reading of the two authors'early prose writings reveals some surprisingly affinitive concerns, rooted in their profoundly troubled relationship with the literary medium and an unceasing struggle for expression of an incoherent reality and a similarly unfathomable self. Situating Gadda and Beckett at the heart of the debate of late European modernism, this study not only contests the position of'insularity'frequently ascribed to both authors by critical consensus, but it also rethinks some of Gadda's plurilingual and macaronic features by situating them in the context of the turn-of-the-century Sprachkrise, or crisis of language. In a close analysis of the primary texts which engages with the latest findings in empirical research, Wehling-Giorgi casts fresh light on the central notions of textual and linguistic fragmentation and provides a new post-Lacanian analysis of the fractured self in Gadda's and Beckett's narrative.'