Unnaming the Subject: Samuel Beckett and Postcolonial Absence

Empire's Wake ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 122-169
Author(s):  
Mark Quigley
Keyword(s):  
2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Quigley

Since David Lloyd's pioneering studies some fifteen years ago, the postcolonial dimension of Beckett's work has received little sustained attention in critical scholarship. This essay contributes to a further evaluation of Beckett's engagement with postcoloniality by examining the ways in which Beckett's critique of the object emerges from a broader critique of postcolonial nationalism. Its discussion focuses particularly on "Recent Irish Poetry" and the "German Letter" as a means of illustrating the ways in which Beckett's impatience with the Irish Literary Revival and its insistence on nationalist representation coincides with the more far-reaching assault on language sketched for Kaun. Proceeding then to , the essay considers how the novel's relentless critique of subject and anti-subject draws much of its energy from Beckett's searching analysis of postcolonial representation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 361-367
Author(s):  
Alexandra Bandac

Abstract I have known Professor Huțanu since the first year of college and, although he wasn’t my professor, I have always admired the glimpse in the eyes of his students when they talked about rehearsing with him for exams or shows. Recently, when I found out that he was staging a show after a text by Samuel Beckett, I dared to approach him in order to “question” him about my favourite author, who is also the subject of my PhD research, as to say, a serious matter. This is how I came to discover a passionate man, director, teacher and actor, who mingles these three hypostases naturally, with diffidence. A generous man, who has permitted me to lift up (with shyness from me, of course) the frail curtain of the creation laboratory behind a difficult show, as to the nature of the animation theatre, implying technical rigors, and also to the aesthetic of the approach. I was permitted to attend rehearsals, to ask questions, to discuss, debate, to have doubts and, more importantly, to receive answers from the man behind the curtain, the one who thought and felt the Godot. Below there is a fragment of an interview – part of my PhD study – and, maybe a subjective mirror of the rustle reflected between the spectator and the creator.


Tekstualia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (55) ◽  
pp. 137-156
Author(s):  
Sławomir Studniarz

The article is devoted to the poetic output of Samuel Beckett, particularly from the pre-war period. It primarily offers a close analysis of three poems: The Vulture, Alba and Dortmunder, from the fi rst printed collection of Beckett’s poetry Echo’s Bones. These texts raise the issue of the place of art and poetic creation in the world, fi lled as it is with suffering inherent to the human condition. The valorization of nighttime and music and the pain-relieving aesthetic contemplation form the major premises of Alba and Dortmunder. And The Vulture, an artistic credo of the young Beckett, defi nes the relations between macrocosm, the objective world, and microcosm, the rich inner life of the subject, vis-à-vis the tasks of poetry. Noting the striking neglect of Beckett’s poetry by the critics, the article undertakes to show that his poetic production merits attention both of scholars and of his devoted admirers.


Author(s):  
David Lloyd

Samuel Beckett was deeply engaged with the visual arts and individual painters, including Jack B. Yeats, Bram van Velde, and Avigdor Arikha. The book explores what Beckett saw in their paintings that would come to shape his own dramas as visual artworks. It explains what visual resources Beckett found in these particular painters rather than in the surrealism of Masson or the abstraction of Kandinsky or Mondrian. The analysis of Beckett’s visual imagination is based on his quite extensive art criticism and on close analysis of the paintings that he would actually have viewed. Lloyd shows how Beckett’s fascination with these painters illuminates the ‘painterly’ qualities of his theatre and the philosophical, political and aesthetic implications of Beckett’s highly visual dramatic work. These implications center on his interrogation of the philosophical, political and aesthetic limits of representation in the wake of decolonization, fascism and world war. The book argues that in place of the subject-object relation that underpins modern concepts of representation, Beckett seeks to present the human as a thing in a world reduced to thingliness.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberta Cauchi Santoro

This book challenges critical approaches that argue for Giacomo Leopardi’s and Samuel Beckett’s pessimism and nihilism. Such approaches stem from the quotation of Leopardi in Beckett’s monograph Proust, as part of a discussion about the removal of desire. Nonetheless, in contrast to ataraxia as a form of ablation of desire, the desire of and for the Other is here presented as central in the two authors’ oeuvres. Desire in Leopardi and Beckett is read as lying at the cusp between the theories of Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas, a desire that splits as much as it moulds the subject when called to address the Other (inspiring what Levinas terms ‘infinity’ as opposed to ‘totality,’ an infinity pitted against the nothingness crucial to pessimist and nihilist readings).


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document