Beckett remains one of the most important writers of the twentieth century whose radical experimentations in form and content won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. This Critical Companion encompasses his plays for the stage, radio and television, and will be indispensable to students of his work. Challenging and at times perplexing, Beckett's work is represented on almost every literature, theatre and Irish studies curriculum in universities in North America, Europe and Australia. Katherine Weiss' admirably clear study of his work provides the perfect companion, illuminating each play and Beckett's vision, and investigating his experiments with the body, voice and technology. It includes in-depth studies of the major works Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape, and as with other volumes in Methuen Drama's Critical Companions series it features too a series of essays by other scholars and practitioners offering different critical perspectives on Beckett in performance that will inform students' own critical thinking. Together with a series of resources including a chronology and a list of further reading, this is ideal for all students and readers of Beckett's work.

Memory is not a thing that we call upon, it is an event that we experience. Each time we speak, we do not access a memory, but create a new memory - we compose a new memory event. Our memory is a constant decomposition and recomposition process, and this process, in many ways, is who we are. Our everyday communication is governed by a complex cognitive process so innate in our neurological composition that we rarely pause to consider it. Their Synaptic Selves examines the cognitive shifts that memory events force in our everyday language. It explores how authors like Samuel Beckett and James Joyce interpret these types of events, specifically discussing how spatialization and mapping affect memory. For these authors, it is the failure of memory (and its linguistic manifestation) that teaches us how we think. By looking at these moments of failure or slippage in light of philosophers like Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze we can come to understand more fully the complex and elusive approaches through which these authors deal with memory and its role in language. Only then can we begin to examine the way we actually use language and read texts today.

Beckett remains one of the most important writers of the twentieth century whose radical experimentations in form and content won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. This Critical Companion encompasses his plays for the stage, radio and television, and will be indispensable to students of his work. Challenging and at times perplexing, Beckett's work is represented on almost every literature, theatre and Irish studies curriculum in universities in North America, Europe and Australia. Katherine Weiss' admirably clear study of his work provides the perfect companion, illuminating each play and Beckett's vision, and investigating his experiments with the body, voice and technology. It includes in-depth studies of the major works Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape, and as with other volumes in Methuen Drama's Critical Companions series it features too a series of essays by other scholars and practitioners offering different critical perspectives on Beckett in performance that will inform students' own critical thinking. Together with a series of resources including a chronology and a list of further reading, this is ideal for all students and readers of Beckett's work.