Samuel Becketts Artistic Theory And Practice

Between 1929 and 1949 Beckett wrote a number of essays, notes and reviews. Though this early work may seem minor, there nevertheless emerges from it a consistent artistic theory concerned with the relationship between art and the limits of human knowledge. The fascinating variety of ways in which Beckett put theory into practice in his early fiction from Dream of Fair to Middling Women to The Unnamable, and in his drama from Waiting for Godot to What Where, forms the subject of this book.

Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts is the first book to comprehensively assess Beckett's knowledge of art, art history and art criticism. In his lifetime Beckett thought deeply about visual culture from ancient Egyptian statuary to Dutch realism, from Quattrocento painting to the modernists and after. Drawing on a wide range of published and unpublished sources, this book traces in forensic detail the development of Beckett's understanding of painting in particular, as that understanding developed from the late 1920s to the 1970s. In doing so it demonstrates that Beckett's thinking about art and aesthetics radically changes in the course of his life, often directly responding to the intellectual and historical contexts in which he found himself. Moving fluently between art history, philosophy, literary analysis and historical context, Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts rethinks the trajectory of Beckett's career, and reorients his relationship to modernism, late modernism and the avant-gardes.

This book, first published in 1999, addresses Beckett’s visual and musical sensibilities, and examines his visionary use of such diverse modes of creative expression as stage, radio, television and film, when his medium was the written word. The first section of the book focuses on music; the second part analyses the visual arts; and the third part examines film, radio and television. This book uncovers aspects of his thinking on, and use of the arts that have been little studied, including the nonfigurative function of music and art in Beckett’s work; the ‘collaborations’ undertaken by composers, painters and choreographers with his texts; the relation of his literary to his visual and musical artistry; and his use of film, radio and television as innovative means and celebration of artistic process.

Exploring Beckett's relationship with the visual arts and its influence on his creative expression

This groundbreaking collection from scholars and artists on the legacy of Beckett in contemporary art provides readers with a unique view of this important writer for page, stage, and screen. The volume argues that Beckett is more than an influence on contemporary art--he is, in fact, a contemporary artist, working alongside artists across disciplines in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond. The volume explores Beckett's formal experiments in drama, prose, and other media as contemporary, parallel revisions of modernism's theoretical presuppositions congruent with trends like minimalism and conceptual art. Containing interviews with and pieces by working artists, alongside contributions of scholars of literature and the visual arts, this collection offers an essential reassessment of Beckett's work. Perceiving Beckett's ongoing importance from the perspective of contemporary art practices, dominated by installation and conceptual strategies, it offers a completely new frame through which to read perennial Beckettian themes of impotence, failure, and penury. From Beckett's remains, as it were, contemporary artists find endless inspiration.

This study uses Zen Buddhism and Chaos theory as binocular lenses to examine the existential difficulties in Samuel Beckett's plays in terms that circumvent traditional Western schools of thought. The book first outlines the salient points of Zen Buddhism and Chaos theory, examining the interplay of ideas between the two disciplines. The balance of the book uses Zen and Chaos theory to reveal new patterns and layers of meaning (or non meaning) in several of Beckett's most significant plays.

This book considers how Samuel Beckett’s critical essays, dialogues and reflections drew together longstanding philosophical discourses about the nature of representation, and fostered crucial, yet overlooked, connections between these discourses and his fiction and poetry. It also pays attention to Beckett’s writing for little-magazines in France from the 1930s to the 1950s, before going on to consider how the style of Beckett’s late prose recalls and develops figures and themes in his critical writing. By providing a long-overdue assessment of Beckett’s work as a critic, this study shows how Beckett developed a new aesthetic in knowing dialogue with ideas including phenomenology, Kandinsky’s theories of abstraction, and avant-garde movements such as Surrealism. This book will be illuminating for students and researchers interested not just in Beckett, but in literary modernism, the avant-garde, European visual culture and philosophy.

Beckett and Aesthetics, first published in 2003, examines Samuel Beckett's struggle with the recalcitrance of artistic media, their refusal to yield to his artistic purposes. As a young man Beckett hoped that writing could provide psychic authenticity and true representation of the physical world; instead he found himself immersed in artificialities and self-enclosed word games. Daniel Albright argues that Beckett escaped from this bind through allegories of artistic frustration and through an art of non-representation, estrangement and general failure. He arrived, Albright shows, at some grasp of fact through the most indirect route available. Albright explores Beckett's experimentation with the notion that an artistic medium might itself be made to speak. This powerful and highly original book explores Beckett's own engagement with radio, film, and television, prose and drama as part of an attempt to escape the confines of the aesthetic. Albright's Beckett becomes a sophisticated theorist of the very notion of the aesthetic.

A selectively comprehensive bibliography of the vast literature about Samuel Beckett's dramatic works, arranged for the efficient and convenient use of scholars on all levels.