This intriguing study examines the truth behind the myths and misconceptions that defined the Roaring Twenties, as portrayed through the popular literary works of the time. This one-stop reference to the "Jazz Age"-the period that began after the First World War and ended with the stock market crash of 1929-digs into the cultural, historical, and literary contexts of the era. Author Linda De Roche examines the writing of the time to look beyond the common conceptions of the Roaring Twenties and instead reflect on the era's complexities and contradictions, including how gender and race influenced social mores. The book profiles key American literature of the time, including F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Sinclair Lewis's Babbit, Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Nella Larsen's Passing. Filled with essays that offer historical explorations of each work as well as suggested learning activities, chapters also feature study questions, primary source documents, and chronologies. Support materials include activities, lesson plans, discussion questions, topics for further research, and suggested readings. Outlines key events and developments and provides context for the historical period and work Aligns with Common Core standards in English language arts and social studies Discusses five major writers of the Jazz Age Provides numerous suggestions for class activities and further individual exploration Supplies educators with ready reference work that aligns with Common Core Standards in English Language Arts (ELA) in Social Studies Gives readers insight into how literature and other art forms reflect the social conditions and are inspired by events of the time

The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry gives readers a cutting-edge introduction to the kaleidoscopic world of American poetry over the last century. Offering a comprehensive approach to the debates that have defined the study of American verse, the twenty-five original essays contained herein take up a wide array of topics: the influence of jazz on the Beats and beyond; European and surrealist influences on style; poetics of the disenfranchised; religion and the national epic; antiwar and dissent poetry; the AIDS epidemic; digital innovations; transnationalism; hip hop; and more. Alongside these topics, major interpretive perspectives such as Marxist, psychoanalytic, disability, queer, and ecocritcal are incorporated. Throughout, the names that have shaped American poetry in the period--Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Sterling Brown, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Posey, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Larry Eigner, and others--serve as touchstones along the tour of the poetic landscape.

Ideographic Modernism offers a critical account of the ideograph (Chinese writing as imagined in the West) as a modernist invention. Rather than focusing on the accuracy of this ideograph as a kind of representation of China (a focus that would yield predictable results), Christopher Bush reconstructs the specific history of the ideograph in order to explore the question of representation in more fundamental ways, ways that reflect the diversity and complexity of literary modernism itself.
On one level, the book makes an argument about the meaning and function of the ideograph during the modernist period, namely that this imagined Chinese writing was a complex response to the various writings of such technological media as the photograph, the phonograph, the cinematograph, and the telegraph. Through analyses of works by Claudel, Pound, Kafka, Benjamin, Segalen, and Valery, among others, Ideographic Modernism traces the interweaving of Western modernity's ethnographic and technological imaginaries, in which the cultural effects of technological media assumed "Chinese" forms, even as traditional representations of "the Orient" lived on in modernist-era responses to media.
On another level, the book makes a methodological argument, demonstrating new ways of recovering the generally overlooked presence of China in the text of Western modernism. In addition to being its subject matter, then, ideographic modernism is also the book's method: a polemically "literal" way of reading that calls for reevaluations both of how modernist literature related to its historical contexts and of the ways in which we can understand that relationship today."

This books provides students with an introduction to the work of Ian McEwan that places his fiction in historical and theoretical context. It explores his biography and his hallmark literary techniques, and it looks at the issues of ethics and representation, focusing particularly on his most recent fiction. Including a timeline of key dates and an interview with the author, this guide offers an accessible reading of McEwan's work and an overview of the varied critical reception this has provoked.

John Edgar Tidwell and Steven C. Tracy have brought together for the first time a book-length collection of critical and theoretical writings about Sterling A. Brown that recovers and reasserts his continuing importance for a contemporary audience. Exploring new directions in the study of Brown's life and work, After Winter is structured around the following three features: (1) new and previously published essays that sum up contemporary approaches to the multifaceted works that Brown created in a variety of genres; (2) interviews with Brown's acquaitances and contemporaries that articulate his unique aesthetic vision and communicate his importance as a scholar, creative writer, and teacher; and (3) a discography of source material that innovatively extends the study and teaching of Brown's acclaimed poetry, especially his Southern Road, focusing on recordings of folk materials relevant to the subject matter, style, and meaning of individual poems from his oeuvre.

With the weakening moral authority of the Catholic Church, the boom ushered in by the Celtic Tiger, and the slow but steady diminishment of the Troubles in the North, Ireland has finally stepped out from the shadows of colonial oppression onto the world stage as a major cosmopolitan country.Taking its title from a veiled reference to Roger Casement-the humanitarian and Irish patriot hanged for treason-in James Joyce's Ulysses, The Poor Bugger's Tool demonstrates how the affective labor of Irish queer culture might contribute to a progressive new national image for the Republic and Northern Ireland.
Looking back to the first wave of Irish modernism in the works of Wilde, Synge, Casement, and Joyce, Patrick Mullen reveals how these authors deployed queer aesthetics to shape inclusive forms of national affiliation as well as to sharpen anti-imperialist critiques. In its second half, the monograph turns its attention to Ireland's postmodernist boom in the works of Patrick McCabe, Neil Jordan, and Jamie O'Neill. With readings of The Butcher Boy, Breakfast on Pluto, and At Swim Two Boys, Mullen shows that queer sensibilities and style remain key cultural resources for negotiating the political and economic realities of globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Buttressed by writings of theorists like Marx, Foucault, and Antonio Negri, The Poor Bugger's Tool brings Irish literature into a fruitful dialog with queer theory, postcolonial studies, the history of sexuality, and modernist aesthetics.

This book explores the mental and literary awakening that many working-class women in the United States experienced when they left the home and began to work in factories early in the nineteenth century. Cook also examines many of the literary productions from this group of women ranging from their first New England magazine of belles lettres, The Lowell Offering, to Emma Goldman's periodical, Mother Earth; from Lucy Larcom's epic poem of women factory workers, An Idyl of Work, to Theresa Malkiel's fictional account of sweatshop workers in New York, The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker. Working women's avid interests in books and writing evolved in the context of an American romanticism that encouraged ideals of self-reliance that were not formulated with factory girls in mind. Their efforts to pursue a life of the mind while engaged in arduous bodily labour also coincided with the emergence of middle-class women writers from private and domestic lives into the literary marketplace. However, while middle-class women risked forfeiting their status as ladies by trying to earn money by becoming writers, factory women were accused of selling out their class credentials by trying to be literary. Cook traces the romantic literariness of several generations of working-class women in their own writing and the broader literary responses of those who shared some, though by no means all, of their interests. The most significant literary interaction, however, is with middle-class women writers. Some of these, like Margaret Fuller, envisioned ideals of female self-development that inspired, without always including, working women. Others, like novelists Davis, Phelps, Alcott, and Scudder, created compassionate fictions of their economic and social inequities but balked at promoting their artistic and intellectual equality.

Landscapes of Hope: Anti-Colonial Utopianism in America examines anti-colonial discourse during the understudied but critical period before World War Two, with a specific focus on writers and activists based in the United States. Dohra Ahmad adds to the fields of American Studies, utopian studies, and postcolonial theory by situating this growing anti-colonial literature as part of an American utopian tradition. In the key early decades of the twentieth century, Ahmad shows, the intellectuals of the colonized world carried out the heady work of imagining independent states, often from a position of exile. Faced with that daunting task, many of them composed literary texts--novels, poems, contemplative essays--in order to conceptualize the new societies they sought. Beginning by exploring some of the conventions of American utopian fiction at the turn of the century, Landscapes of Hope goes on to show the surprising ways in which writers such as W.E B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, Rabindranath Tagore, and Punjabi nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai appropriated and adapted those utopian conventions toward their own end of global colored emancipation.

The most famous name in French literary circles from the late 1950s till his death in 1981, Roland Barthes maintained a contradictory rapport with the cinema. As a cultural critic, he warned of its surreptitious ability to lead the enthralled spectator toward an acceptance of a pre-given world. As a leftist, he understood that spectacle could be turned against itself and provoke deep questioning of that pre-given world. And as an extraordinarily sensitive human being, he relished the beauty of images and the community they could bring together.

This collection seeks to illustrate the ways in which Thomas Mann's 1924 novel, The Magic Mountain, has been newly construed by some of today's most astute readers in the field of Mann studies. The essays, many of which were written expressly for this volume, comment on some of the familiar and inescapable topics of Magic Mountain scholarship, including the questions of genre and ideology, the philosophy of time, and the ominous subjects of disease and medical practice. Moreover, this volume offers fresh approaches to the novel's underlying notions of masculinity, to its embodiment of the cultural code of anti-Semitism, and to its precarious relationship to the rival media of photography, cinema, and recorded sound.

Kafka's novel The Trial, written from 1914 to 1915 and published in 1925, is a multi-faceted, notoriously difficult manifestation of European literary modernism, and one of the most emblematic books of the 20th Century. It tells the story of Josef K., a man accused of a crime he has no recollection of committing and whose nature is never revealed to him. The novel is often interpreted theologically as an expression of radical nihilism and a world abandoned by God. It is also read as a parable of the cold, inhumane rationality of modern bureaucratization. Like many other novels of this turbulent period, it offers a tragic quest-narrative in which the hero searches for truth and clarity (whether about himself, or the anonymous system he is facing), only to fall into greater and greater confusion. This collection of nine new essays and an editor's introduction brings together Kafka experts, intellectual historians, literary scholars, and philosophers in order to explore the novel's philosophical and theological significance. Authors pursue the novel's central concerns of justice, law, resistance, ethics, alienation, and subjectivity. Few novels display human uncertainty and skepticism in the face of rapid modernization, or the metaphysical as it intersects with the most mundane aspects of everyday life, more insistently than The Trial. Ultimately, the essays in this collection focus on how Kafka's text is in fact philosophical in the ways in which it achieves its literary aims. Rather than considering ideas as externally related to the text, the text is considered philosophical at the very level of literary form and technique.

Photos filled with the forlorn faces of hungry and impoverished Americans that came to characterize the desolation of the Great Depression are among the best known artworks of the twentieth century. Captured by the camera's eye, these stark depictions of suffering became iconic markers of a formative period in U.S. history. Although there has been an ample amount of critical inquiry on Depression-era photographs, the bulk of scholarship treats them as isolated art objects. And yet they were often joined together with evocative writing in a genre that flourished amid the period, the documentary book. American Modernism and Depression Documentary looks at the tradition of the hybrid, verbal-visual texts that flourished during a time when U.S. citizens were becoming increasingly conscious of the life of a larger nation.
Jeff Allred draws on a range of seminal works to illustrate the convergence of modernism and documentary, two forms often regarded as unrelated. Whereas critics routinely look to James Agee and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as the sole instance of the modernist documentary book, Allred turns to such works as Richard Wright's scathing 12 Million Black Voices, and the oft-neglected You Have Seen Their Faces by Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White to open up the critical playing field. And rather than focusing on the ethos of Progressivism and/or the politics and aesthetics of the New Deal, Allred emphasizes the centrality of Life magazine to the consolidation of a novel cultural form.

Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer are writers renowned for crafting narratives of great technical skill that resonate with potent truths on the colonial condition. Yet given the generational and geographical boundaries that separated them, they are seldom considered in conjunction with one another. The Passage of Literature unites the three in a bracing comparative study that breaks away from traditional conceptions of modernism, going beyond temporal periodization and the entrenched Anglo-American framework that undergirds current scholarship.
This study nimbly traces a trio of distinct yet interrelated modernist genealogies. English modernism as exemplified by Conrad's Malay trilogy is productively paired with the hallmark work of Indonesian modernism, Pramoedya's Buru quartet. The two novel sequences, penned years apart, narrate overlapping histories of imperialism in the Dutch East Indies, and both make opera central for understanding the cultural dynamic of colonial power. Creole modernism--defined not only by the linguistic diversity of the Caribbean but also by an alternative vision of literary history--provides a transnational context for reading Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea, each novel mapped in relation to the colonial English and postcolonial Indonesian coordinates of Conrad's The Shadow-Line and Pramoedya's This Earth of Mankind. All three modernisms-English, Creole, and Indonesian-converge in a discussion of the Indonesian figure of the nyai, a concubine or house servant, who represents the traumatic core of transnational modernism. Throughout the study, Pramoedya's extraordinary effort to reconstruct the lost record of Indonesia's emergence as a nation provides a model for reading each fragmentary passage of literature as part of an ongoing process of decolonizing tradition.
Drawing on translated and un-translated works of fiction and nonfiction, GoGwilt effectively reexamines the roots of Anglophone modernist studies, thereby laying out the imperatives of a new postcolonial philology even as he resituates European modernism within the literary, linguistic, and historical context of decolonization.

Iris Murdoch's philosophy has long attracted readers searching for a morally serious yet humane perspective on human life. Her eloquent call for "a theology which can continue without God" has been especially attractive to those who find that they can live neither with religion nor without it. By developing a form of thinking that is neither exclusively secular nor traditionally religious, Murdoch sought to recapture the existential or spiritual import of philosophy. Long before the current wave of interest in spiritual exercises, she approached philosophy not only as an academic discourse, but as a practice whose aim is the transformation of perception and consciousness. As she put it, a moral philosophy should be capable of being "inhabited"; that is, it should be "a philosophy one could live by."
In A Philosophy to Live By, Maria Antonaccio argues that Murdoch's thought embodies an ascetic model of philosophy for contemporary life. Extending and complementing the argument of her earlier monograph, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch, this new work establishes Murdoch's continuing relevance by engaging her thought with a variety of contemporary thinkers and debates in ethics from a perspective informed by Murdoch's philosophy as a whole. Among the prominent philosophers engaged here are Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, Stephen Mulhall, John Rawls, Pierre Hadot, and Michel Foucault, and theologians such as Stanley Hauerwas, David Tracy, William Schweiker, and others. These engagements represent a sustained effort to think with Murdoch, yet also beyond her, by enlisting the resources of her thought to explore wider debates at the intersections of moral philosophy, religion, art, and politics, and in doing so, to illuminate the distinctive patterns and tropes of her philosophical style.

A perfect guide for use in high school classes, this book explores the fascinating literature of the Harlem Renaissance, reviewing classic works in the context of the history, society, and culture of its time. The Harlem Renaissance is one of the most interesting eras in African American literature as well as a highly regarded period in our country's literary history. The works produced during this span reflect a turbulent social climate in America ... a time fraught with both opportunities and injustices for minorities. In this enlightening guide, author and educator Lynn Domina examines the literature of the Harlem Renaissance along with the cultural and societal factors influencing its writers. This compelling book illuminates the cultural conditions affecting the lives of African Americans everywhere, addressing topics such as prohibition, race riots, racism, interracial marriage, sharecropping, and lynching. Each chapter includes historical background on both the literary work and the author and explores several themes through historical document excerpts and thoughtful analysis to illustrate how literature responded to the surrounding social circumstances. Chapters conclude with a discussion of why and how the literary work remains relevant today. Discusses five major writers of the Harlem Renaissance Provides numerous suggestions for class activities and further individual exploration Supplies educators with ready reference work that aligns with Common Core Standards in English Language Arts (ELA) in Social Studies Gives readers insight into how literature and other art forms reflect the social conditions and are inspired by events of the time

We are still a long way from knowing how to read the rhythms of free verse, a poetry which has been largely neglected by metrical theory. Clive Scott's readable and scholarly study indicates the strategies of reading needed if justice is to be done to free verse's rhythmic versatility. The core of Reading the Rhythm is an analysis of key French twentieth-century poets and poems, including Perse's Eloges, Cendrars's Prose du Transsiberien, Dix-neuf poemes elastiques, and Documentaires; Apollinaire's Calligrammes; Supervielle's Gravitations; and Reverdy's Sources de vent. Contemporary trends in the visual arts - Cubism, Futurism, Orphism, photography - are called upon as perceptual models to illuminate free verse and a further perspective is added by the theme of travel and movement. This is an accomplished examination of the rhythms of free verse, and of its implications for our reading of regular verse. It is also a significant study of modernist poetics.

Copyright looms large in the digital world. As users and creators of expressive works, we all know more about copyright than we did a decade ago. But scholars of modernism have felt a special urgency in grappling with this branch of law, whose rapid expansion in recent years has prolonged or revived the rights in many modernist works. Indeed, thanks to public clashes between estates and users, 'modernism' has lately begun to seem like a byword for contested intellectual property. At the same time, today's volatile legal climate has prompted us to ask how modernism was, from its beginning, shaped by intellectual property law-and how modernists sought variously to exploit, reform, anoint, and evade copyright. We are beginning to discover, too, how copyright's transatlantic and imperial asymmetries during the modernist decades helped set the stage for its geopolitical role in the new millennium. Modernism and Copyright is the first book to take up these questions and discoveries in all their urgency. A truly multi-disciplinary study, it brings together essays by well-known scholars of literature, theater, cinema, music, and law as well as by practicing lawyers and caretakers of modernist literary estates. Its contributors' methods are as diverse as the works they discuss: Ezra Pound's copyright statute and Charlie Parker's bebop compositions feature here, as do early Chaplin, EverQuest, and the Madison Avenue memo. As our portrait of modernism expands and fragments, Modernism and Copyright locates works like these on one of the few landscapes they all clearly share: the uneven terrain of intellectual property law.

In this book, Susan Edmunds explores he relationship between modernist domestic fiction and the rise of the U.S. welfare state. This relationship, which began in the Progressive era, emerged as maternalist reformers developed an inverted discourse of social housekeeping in order to call for state protection and regulation of the home. Modernists followed suit, turning the genre of domestic fiction inside out in order to represent new struggles on the border between home, market and state. Edmunds uses the work of Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, Tillie Olsen, Edna Ferber, Nathanael West, and Flannery O'Connor to trace the significance of modernists' radical reconstitution of the genre of domestic fiction. Using a grotesque aesthetic of revolutionary inversion, these writers looped their depictions of the domestic sphere through revolutionary discourses associated with socialism, consumerism and the avant-garde. These authors used their grotesque discourses to deal with issues of social conflict ranging from domestic abuse and racial violence to educational reform, public health care, eugenics, and social security. With the New Deal, the U.S. welfare state realized maternalist ambitions to disseminate a modern sentimental version of the home to all white citizens, successfully translating radical bids for collective social security into a racialized order of selective and detached domestic security. The book argues that modernists engaged and contested this historical trajectory from the start. In the process, they forged an enduring set of terms for understanding and negotiating the systemic forms of ambivalence, alienation and conflict that accompany Americans' contemporary investments in"family values."

Repetition and Race explores the literary forms and critical frameworks occasioned by the widespread institutionalization of liberal multiculturalism by turning to the exemplary case of Asian American literature. Whether beheld as "model minorities" or objects of "racist love," Asian Americans have long inhabited the uneasy terrain of institutional embrace that characterizes the official antiracism of our contemporary moment. Repetition and Race argues that Asian American literature registers and responds to this historical context through formal structures of repetition. Forwarding a new, dialectical conception of repetition that draws together progress and return, motion and stasis, agency and subjection, creativity and compulsion, this book reinterprets the political grammar of four forms of repetition central to minority discourse: trauma, pastiche, intertextuality, and self-reflexivity. Working against narratives of multicultural triumph, the book shows how texts by Theresa Cha, Susan Choi, Karen Tei Yamashita, Chang-rae Lee, and Maxine Hong Kingston use structures of repetition to foreground moments of social and aesthetic impasse, suspension, or hesitation rather than instances of reversal or resolution. Reading Asian American texts for the way they allegorize and negotiate, rather than resolve, key tensions animating Asian American culture, Repetition and Race maps both the penetrating reach of liberal multiculturalism's disciplinary formations and an expanded field of cultural politics for minority literature.

A portrait of the writer Mikhail Bulgakov, fighting for his work and his life in a society riven with fear of Stalin's tyranny Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev in 1891. He started as a career writing articles and satiric short stories about the revolution and the economic reconstruction in the young Soviet state. He drew on these writings in many of his stage plays which brought him into conflict with the authorities. He died in 1940.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, many in Britain believed their nation to be a dominant world power that its former colony, the United States, could only hope to emulate. Yet by the interwar years, the United States seemed to some to embody a different type of global eminence, one based not only on political and economic stature but also on new forms of mass culture like jazz and the Hollywood film. Britain's fraught transition from formidable empire to victim of Americanization is rarely discussed by literary scholars. However, the dawn of the "American century " is the period of literary modernism and, this book argues, the signs of Americanization-from jazz records to Ford motorcars to Hollywood films-helped to establish the categories of elite and mass culture that still inspire debate in modernist studies. This book thus brings together two major areas of modernist scholarship, the study of nation and empire and the study of mass culture, by suggesting that Britain was reacting to a new type of empire, the American entertainment empire, in its struggles to redefine its national culture between the wars. At the same time, British anxieties about American influence contributed to conceptions of Britain's imperial scope, and what it meant to have or be an empire. Through its treatment of a wide range of authors and cultural phenomena, the book explores how Britain reinvented itself in relation to its ideas of America, and how Britain's literary modernism developed and changed through this reinvention.

In this perceptive and original study of one of the most popular of English poets, Douglas Kerr has written the life of Wilfred Owen's language. The book explores the meaning in Owen's life of the family, the Church, the army, and English poets of the past. It examines the language of these four communities, and shows how their discourses helped to mould the poet's own. The language in which Owen's extraordinary poems and letters are written was learned in and from these communities which shaped his short career. But there were times too when he hated each of them. As Douglas Kerr shows, much of the power of Owen's writing derives from his desire to transform the communities which formed him. Accessible and lucid, and informed by the insights of recent theory, Wilfred Owen's Voices throws important new light on the best-known of the English war poets, and on both the cultural history and intense personal drama to be read in his work.

Derived from the word "to propagate," the idea and practice of propaganda concerns nothing less than the ways in which human beings communicate, particularly with respect to the creation and widespread dissemination of attitudes, images, and beliefs. Much larger than its pejorative connotations suggest, propaganda can more neutrally be understood as a central means of organizing and shaping thought and perception, a practice that has been a pervasive feature of the twentieth century and that touches on many fields. It has been seen as both a positive and negative force, although abuses under the Third Reich and during the Cold War have caused the term to stand in, most recently, as a synonym for untruth and brazen manipulation. Propaganda analysis of the 1950s to 1989 too often took the form of empirical studies about the efficacy of specific methods, with larger questions about the purposes and patterns of mass persuasion remaining unanswered. In the present moment where globalization and transnationality are arguably as important as older nation forms, when media enjoy near ubiquity throughout the globe, when various fundamentalisms are ascendant, and when debates rage about neoliberalism, it is urgent that we have an up-to-date resource that considers propaganda as a force of culture writ large. The handbook will include twenty-two essays by leading scholars from a variety of disciplines, divided into three sections. In addition to dealing with the thorny question of definition, the handbook will take up an expansive set of assumptions and a full range of approaches that move propaganda beyond political campaigns and warfare to examine a wide array of cultural contexts and practices.

When Did Indians Become Straight? explores the complex relationship between contested U.S. notions of normality and shifting forms of Native American governance and self-representation. Examining a wide range of texts (including captivity narratives, fiction, government documents, and anthropological tracts), Mark Rifkin offers a cultural and literary history of the ways Native peoples have been inserted into Euramerican discourses of sexuality and how Native intellectuals have sought to reaffirm their peoples' sovereignty and self-determination.

The year 2006 marked the centenary of the birth of Nobel-Prize winning playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett. To commemorate the occasion, this collection brings together twenty-three leading international Beckett scholars from ten countries, who take on the centenary challenge of "revolving it all": that is, going "back to Beckett"-the title of an earlier study by critic Ruby Cohn, to whom the book is dedicated-in order to rethink traditional readings and theories; provide new contexts and associations; and reassess his impact on the modern imagination and legacy to future generations. These original essays, most first presented by the Samuel Beckett Working Group at the Dublin centenary celebration, are divided into three sections: (1) Thinking through Beckett, (2) Shifting Perspectives, and (3) Echoing Beckett. As repeatedly in his canon, images precede words. The book opens with stills from films of experimental filmmaker Peter Gidal and unpublished excerpts from Beckett's 1936-37 German Travel Diaries, presented by Beckett biographer James Knowlson, with permission from the Beckett estate.
Renowned director and theatre theoretician Herbert Blau follows with his personal Beckett "thinking through." Others in Part I explore Beckett and philosophy (Abbott), the influences of Bergson (Gontarski) and Leibniz (Mori), Beckett and autobiography (Locatelli), and Agamben on post-Holocaust testimony (Jones). Essays in Part II recontextualize Beckett's works in relation to iconography (Moorjani), film theoretician Rudolf Arnheim (Engelberts), Marshall McLuhan (Ben-Zvi), exilic writing (McMullan), Pierre Bourdieu's literary field (Siess), romanticism (Brater), social theorists Adorno andHorkheimer (Degani-Raz), and performance issues (Rodriguez-Gago). Part III relates Beckett's writing to that of Yeats (Okamuro), Paul Auster (Campbell), Caryl Churchill (Diamond), William Saroyan (Bryden), Minoru Betsuyaku and Harold Pinter (Tanaka) and Morton Feldman and Jasper Johns (Laws). Finally, Beckett himself becomes a character in other playwrights' works (Zeifman). Taken together these essays make a clear case for the challenges and rewards of thinking through Beckett in his second century.