At the Crossroads of Memory and Imagination: a Poetic Image of a Window at Night in Samuel Beckett’s "A Piece of Monologue"

The pivotal objective of this research is to analyse a poetic image of an imaginary window at night as well as a “ghost” room in Samuel Beckett’s play A Piece of Monologue through the binary lens of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, and Beckett’s biography. An absent onstage window, being part of an imagined reality created by the Speaker, becomes the nexus of this short play, and is discussed in relation to its locus, the writer’s memory, and material imagination. Tightly linked to Beckett’s life, childhood home and the instance of his birth, this image becomes a multi-layered construct, which gains a life of its own in the play and represents the universal themes of birth, death, loss of loved ones and mourning.

Venise des deux côtés du miroir : Imaginaire et identité entre l’amour et la mort

"Venice, deeply imaginary and symbolic, is in various cultural documents, like books, paintings, cinema, music, photography and other arts. In this research, we use the literary and the poetic narrative as privileged sources for understanding the imaginary and the identity of this city, closely connected with love and with death too. This investigation uses as a method Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology defined in The Poetics of Space and the symbolical imaginary described in relation to the material imagination in Water and Dreams. Venice is a city on water and its identity is closely associated with love, as one mirror side, and with death or even hell, as the other mirror side."

The Dynamic Dialectic and the Eclectic Plaintive Rhythm in Bembeya Jazz’s, Black Beats Music

The foremost line of the post-independent music evolves especially, from a simple to a more compound whole within the understanding of convention of representation and the association of experience become structural materials. Thereby, the basic component of conventional imagery, and the colonialist dynamic straightforward influences frame a new idiosyncratic type that evaluates the establishment of realty, memory and symbol. Correspondingly, through the foundation of intellectual and artistic image, the commensurate imagination of the musical nationalism schedule moves afar unconscious and insensate sensitivity. Indeed, the cultural and artistic body of the Bembeya Jazz and the Black Beats Band deconstruct the colonialist conventional perception of productivity; then, through extensive collective relation with their time and space, their nationalistic music exhibits boundaries of cross-examination regarding the realm of recombination, reconciliation and re-appropriation. Within the respect of material imagination and objective reality, verbal text, and contemporary Western musical instruments become the developing artistic cosmos within a new social and linguistic narrative is structured. Hence, the commitment of this article stands as a diagnostic process within we try to grasp the rapport of the indigenous value of imagination and the transcontinental stylistic effects inside the historio-context of redefining the self, sociolinguistic reflectivity, and perceptive sensibility in post-independent era.

Material Culture

This chapter discusses Dickens’s playful engagement with material culture, noting key stylistic features and the implications for subject–object relations. It distinguishes between objects that the narrative marks as significant and others that remain part of the mise-en-scène and examines how commodity criticism and thing theory have raised different types of objects to prominence. Subsequent discussion of a talking antique chair in The Pickwick Papers, bottles of Madeira wine in Dombey and Son, and gifts sent to the author by an admirer explores the importance of long-lived objects to Dickens’s material imagination. Entwining the endurance of things with the impermanence of human life, Dickens’s persistent objects offer further ways to think about the relationship between people and things, and the stories they might tell about one another.