Beckett's afterlives

Adaptation, remediation, appropriation

Jonathan Bignell, Pim Verhulst, Anna McMullan, Jonathan Bignell, Pim Verhulst, Anna McMullan

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9781526153784
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

Despite the steady rise in adaptations of Samuel Beckett's work across the world following the author's death in 1989, Beckett's afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to this creative phenomenon. The collection employs interrelated concepts of adaptation, remediation and appropriation to reflect on Beckett's own evolving approach to crossing genre boundaries and to analyse the ways in which contemporary artists across different media and diverse cultural contexts – including the UK, Europe, the USA and Latin America – continue to engage with Beckett. The book offers fresh insights into how his work has kept inspiring both practitioners and audiences in the twenty-first century, operating through methodologies and approaches that aim to facilitate and establish the study of modern-day adaptations, not just of Beckett but other (multimedia) authors as well.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• 1: Beckett's ‘adaphatroce’ revisited: towards a poetics of adaptation
• 2: Adaptation and convergence: Beckett on Film
• 3: ‘Imprecations from the Brighton Road to Foxrock Station’: the effect of place on Mouth on Fire's stagings of All That Fall
• 4: Engines of reverence? Beckett, festivals and adaptation
• 5: Passing by, gazing upon: gendered agency in adaptations of Come and Go and Happy Days
• 6: ‘last state last version’: adaptation and performance in Gare St Lazare Ireland's How It Is
• 7: Intermedial embodiments: Company SJ's staging of Beckett's Company
• 8: Beckett, neurodiversity and the prosthetic: the posthuman turn in contemporary art
• 9: Beckett and new media adaptation: from the literary corpus to the transmedia archive
• 10: Opera as adaptation: György Kurtág's Samuel Beckett: Fin de partie, scènes et monologues
• 11: Questioning norms in three Beckettian choreographic projections: Maguy Marin, Dominique Dupuy, Joanna Czajkowska
• 12: ‘I'll give you just enough to keep you from dying’: power dynamics disclosed in Tania Bruguera's Endgame
• 13: Godot noir: Beckett in black and whiteface
• 14: Deferred dreams: waiting for freedom and equality in Nwandu and Beckett
• 15: ‘How can you photograph words?’: expanding the Godot universe from adaptation to transmedia storytelling
• 16: The figure of Beckett in four contemporary novels
• Index