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experimental filmmaker Peter Gidal and unpublished excerpts from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.
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