Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies

New Critical Essays

Peter Fifield, David Addyman, Peter Fifield, David Addyman

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781408183618
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781408184523
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

Published in association with the seminar series of the same name held by the University of Oxford, Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies presents the best new scholarship addressing the sources, development and ongoing influence of Samuel Beckett's work. Edited by convenors Dr Peter Fifield and Dr David Addyman, the volume presents ten research essays by leading international scholars ranging across Beckett's work, opening up new avenues of enquiry and association for scholars, students and readers of Beckett's work.

Among the subjects covered the volume includes studies of:
·Beckett and the influence of new media 1956-1960
·the influence of silent film on Beckett's work
·death, loss and Ireland in Beckett's drama - tracing Irish references in Beckett's plays from the 1950s and 1960s, including Endgame, All That Fall, Krapp's Last Tape and Eh Joe
·a consideration of Beckett's theatrical notebooks and annotated copies of his plays which provide a unique insight into his attitude toward the staging of his plays, the ways he himself interpreted his texts and approached theatrical practice.
·the French text of the novel Mercier et Camier, which both biographically and aesthetically appeared at a very significant moment in Beckett's career and indicates a crucial development in his writing
·the matter of tone in Beckett's drama, offering a new reading of the ways in which this elusive property emerges and can be read in the relationship between published text, canon and performance

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Introduction
• 1 Franco-Irish Beckett: Mercier et Camier in 1945–6
• 2 ‘Sweet thing theology’: Beckett, E. M. Cioran and the Lives of the Saints
• 3 En attendant Godot: A New Philosophical Landscape
• 4 Samuel Beckett: The Geometry of the Imagination
• 5 ‘Stations of a Mourner’s Cross’: Beckett, Killiney, 1954
• 6 ‘Close your eyes and listen to it’: Embers and the Difficulties of Listening
• 7 Somnambulism, Amnesia and Fugue: Beckett and (Male) Hysteria
• 8 Samuel Beckett, Video Artist
• 9 Sounds Worthy of the Name: Tone and Historical Feeling in Beckett’s Drama
• 10 Wyndham Lewis’s Pseudocouple: The Childermass as a Precursor of Waiting for Godot
• Index