Imagination Morte Imaginez Imagination Dead Imagine Translated From The French By The Author

Witnessness posits a universal ethics based neither on rational mental structures nor on moral principles, but on the extra-rational powers of the imagination. Harvey pursues this ethics by staging a speculative reading of Samuel Beckett's “untranslatable” text, Worstward Ho, alongside Dante's Purgatorio and Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved and If This Be a Man. Many of the thirty concise chapters that compose Witnessness are built upon notions whose names (e.g. dimness, lessness) take inspiration from Beckett's unique and precise vocabulary. Harvey explores the particular experience of the witness as recounted in Dante and Levi-for signs of a general, common, and innate witness-like attitude that protects the other and that we see expressed in Beckett's penultimate prose piece.

Collectively the works of Samuel Beckett, winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature, reveal a remarkable continuity of theme. Together his writings present a particular view of life and each novel constitutes part of a larger whole.

This set comprises 40 volumes covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

A well-known English author has told the story of how he discovered one of Beckett's early novels in a London public library. He appropriated the copy because the date-stamp revealed that it had only been borrowed once in the fifteen years following its publication. Samuel Beckett, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, has remained for most of his career a difficult an avant-garde writer; but like his compatriot, James Joyce, he has wielded a more potent literary influence than many authors who command a far wider public. The discoveries of modern science and mathematics have intensified the human awareness of the infinite and Beckett himself is peculiarly sensitive to the idea that man is 'a scrap of life surrounded by death, a something that encircled by nothing'. Both his novels and his plays have a predominantly philosophical bent: their aim is a search for the nature of reality rather than the construction of plausible fictions. Beckett is much concerned with the difficulties of human communication and with man's doom of solitude, and he expresses these preoccupations through a symbolism of blindness, of immobility, of an existence stripped down to the bare essentials of nutrition and excretion: these images which he has made familiar through his plays convey a sense of dereliction which is undoubtedly attuned to the spirit of the post-war world. Yet at the same time he possesses the peculiarly Irish faculty for giving this desolate vision a comic dimension. Professor Mayoux's essay traces Beckett's literary development from his early poems through the novels to his plays for the theatre and the radio, and finally to the short, rigorously compressed fables or visions of the last few years. He notes Beckett's adoption of the French language for many of his writings, a choice which seems designed to emphasize the foreign-ness, the externality of all language. Like Ionesco, Beckett has never become a French writer, but remained an Irishman writing in French.

Presents an overview of the work of Samuel Beckett. Discussing his famous as well as lesser known texts, the book shows how his characters incorporate silence in their speech to narrate their deaths. Finally it examines Stirring Still, his last text, which evokes his own imminent death.

Suppose that, before he is writing fiction, before he is writing drama, before he is writing any of the autonomous, highly polished pieces that make up his life work, Beckett is writing Beckett. What follows from this? In Beckett Writing Beckett, H. Porter Abbott argues that, by the time he had written Waiting for Godot, Beckett's art had crystallized as a life project keyed to the simultaneous action of writing and reading the self. How does such an interpretive shift change the way we see the salient features of Beckett's art: his extraordinary and persistent assaults on narrative, his restless exploration of genres and media, his attempts to exercise autocratic control over performance and publication, his increasingly musical formal structures, his tireless capacity to invent? How, moreover, does this view relate to the contempt for autobiography so pervasive in Beckett's work? In approaching these questions, Abbott seeks to redirect current discussion of such concepts as "the author" and "originality". Arguing on several widely contested fronts in Beckett criticism, including such vexed issues as Beckett's postmodernism, his politics, and his relation to his audience, Abbott develops an interpretive method grounded in the concept of "autographical action". The method allows Abbott to articulate the centrality of the inexhaustible strangeness of Beckett's work, and to do so without robbing that strangeness of its power to surprise.

The Nobel Prize winning author Samuel Beckett is a literary treasure, and this work represents the only comprehensive reference to the concepts, characters, and biographical details mentioned by, or related to, Beckett. Painstakingly and lovingly compiled by acclaimed Beckett scholars C.J. Ackerley and S.E. Gontarski, it is alphabetical, cross-referenced, and laid out in a very user-friendly format. The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett provides an organized trove of information for students and scholars alike, and is a must for any serious reader of Beckett. As most Beckettians know, “reading [him] for the first time is an experience like no other in modern literature.” (Paul Auster)