Becketts Words

At stake in this book is a struggle with language in a time when our old faith in the redeeming of the word-and the word's power to redeem-has almost been destroyed. Drawing on Benjamin's political theology, his interpretation of the German Baroque mourning play, and Adorno's critical aesthetic theory, but also on the thought of poets and many other philosophers, especially Hegel's phenomenology of spirit, Nietzsche's analysis of nihilism, and Derrida's writings on language, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, because of its communicative and revelatory powers, language bears the utopian "promise of happiness," the idea of a secular redemption of humanity, at the very heart of which must be the achievement of universal justice. In an original reading of Beckett's plays, novels and short stories, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, despite inheriting a language damaged, corrupted and commodified, Beckett redeems dead or dying words and wrests from this language new possibilities for the expression of meaning. Without denying Beckett's nihilism, his picture of a radically disenchanted world, Kleinberg-Levin calls attention to moments when his words suddenly ignite and break free of their despair and pain, taking shape in the beauty of an austere yet joyous lyricism, suggesting that, after all, meaning is still possible.

Most people most of the time want to live for ever. But there is another truth; the longing for oblivion. With pain, wit, and humour, the art of Samuel Beckett variously embodies this truth, this ancient enduring belief that it is better to be dead than alive, best of all never to have been born. Beckett is the supreme writer of an age which has created new possiblities and impossibilities even in the matter of death and its definition, an age of transplants and life-support. But howdoes a writer give life to dismay at life itself, to the not-simply-unwelcome encroachments of death? After all, it is for the life, the vitality, of their language that we value writers. As a young man, Beckett himself praised Joyce's words. `They are alive.' Beckett became himself as a writer when he realized in his very words a principle of death. In cliches, which are dead but won't lie down. In a dead language and its memento mori. In words which mean their own opposites, cleaving andcleaving. In the self-stultifying or suicidal turn, dubbed the Irish bull. In what Beckett called a syntax of weakness. This book explores the relation between deep convictions about life or death and the incarnations which these take in the exact turns of a great writer - the realizations of an Irishman who wrote in English and in French, two languages with different apprehensions of life and of death.

A radical re-reading of Samuel Beckett's work as promising happiness and enlightenment. Kleinberg-Levin rejects the traditional interpretation of Beckett's work as nihilistic and negative, proposing a Beckett unlike we've ever encountered before.

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

This collection gathers together the Nobel Prize-winning writer Samuel Beckett's English poems (including Whoroscope, his first published verse), English translations of poems by Eluard, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and Chamfort, and poems in French, several of which are presented in translation.

The letters written by Samuel Beckett between 1929 and 1940 provide a vivid and personal view of Western Europe in the 1930s, and mark the gradual emergence of Beckett's unique voice and sensibility. The Cambridge University Press edition of The Letters of Samuel Beckett offers for the first time a comprehensive range of letters of one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century. Selected for their bearing on his work from over 15,000 extant letters, the letters published in this four-volume edition encompass sixty years of Beckett's writing life (1929-1989), and include letters to friends, painters and musicians, as well as to students, publishers, translators, and colleagues in the world of literature and theater. For anyone interested in twentieth-century literature and theater this edition is essential reading, offering not only a record of Beckett's achievements but a powerful literary experience in itself.

This work relates the adventures of an unnamed narrator crawling through the mud while dragging a sack of canned food. It is written as a sequence of unpunctuated paragraphs divided into three sections.

Most people want to live forever. But there is another truth: the longing for oblivion. With pain, wit, and humor, the art of Samuel Beckett variously embodies this truth, this ancient enduring belief that it is better to be dead than alive, best of all never to have been born. Beckett is the supreme writer of an age which has created new possibilities and impossibilities even in the matter of death and its definition--an age of transplants and life-support. But how does a writer give life to dismay at life itself, to the not unwelcome encroachments of death, when it is for the life, the vitality of their language that we value writers? Beckett became himself as a writer when he realized in his very words a principle of death: in clichés, which are dead but won't lie down; in a dead language and its memento mori; in words which mean their own opposites, like cleaving; and in what Beckett called a syntax of weakness. This artful study explores the relation between deep convictions about life or death and the incarnations which these take in the exact turns of a great writer, the realizations of an Irishman who wrote in English and in French, two languages with different apprehensions of life and of death.

In this book Adam Piette establishes fascinating new links between sound effects and the representation of memory in literary texts. He sets out a workable taxonomy of sound-repetitions in prose and formulates, through a theory of alerting-devices, the ways in which the reader's attention is drawn to the acoustic surface of the text. Piette scrutinizes Mallarm 's prose-poetry, Proust's musical syntax, Joyce's memory-rhymes (from the Portrait of the Artist through Ulysses to Finnegans Wake), and Beckett's prose and drama, demonstrating that sound effects act as intricate reminders of memory-traces in the text. Despite how widely the four writers diverge in their representations of memory, Piette shows that the use of this memory-rhyme technique is common to them all.

Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969; his literary output of plays, novels, stories and poetry has earned him an uncontested place as one of the greatest writers of our time. Endgame, originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett himself, is considered by many critics to be his greatest single work. A pinnacle of Beckett’s characteristic raw minimalism, it is a pure and devastating distillation of the human essence in the face of approaching death.