{"title":"James Little, Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space","authors":"C. Duane","doi":"10.3366/jobs.2023.0392","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/jobs.2023.0392","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41421,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43191971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Marguerite Duras and Samuel Beckett, both prominent writers internationally during the same period, and both living in Paris during most of their careers and rooted in French literature, appear to be a remarkable case of closely parallel writerly trajectories in conjunction with an apparent absence of exchange between them. Living in the same capital, they shared aesthetic, theatrical, editorial and political allegiances, and were both at some points intrigued by each other’s work and life. Both produced a medially diverse oeuvre including novels, theatre plays, screenplays, both worked as directors, rather often with the same actors or troupes, and they were regularly considered as examples of the same aesthetic tendencies in literature and the theatre. Their writing – themes and styles – tends to diverge importantly on several points, but Beckett was impressed by Duras' first theatre play, and Duras occasionally identified strikingly with Beckett. Nonetheless, hardly any form of contact or of direct influence between the authors is known.
{"title":"Duras and Beckett: Close Encounters at a Distance","authors":"M. Engelberts","doi":"10.3366/jobs.2023.0387","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/jobs.2023.0387","url":null,"abstract":"Marguerite Duras and Samuel Beckett, both prominent writers internationally during the same period, and both living in Paris during most of their careers and rooted in French literature, appear to be a remarkable case of closely parallel writerly trajectories in conjunction with an apparent absence of exchange between them. Living in the same capital, they shared aesthetic, theatrical, editorial and political allegiances, and were both at some points intrigued by each other’s work and life. Both produced a medially diverse oeuvre including novels, theatre plays, screenplays, both worked as directors, rather often with the same actors or troupes, and they were regularly considered as examples of the same aesthetic tendencies in literature and the theatre. Their writing – themes and styles – tends to diverge importantly on several points, but Beckett was impressed by Duras' first theatre play, and Duras occasionally identified strikingly with Beckett. Nonetheless, hardly any form of contact or of direct influence between the authors is known.","PeriodicalId":41421,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47372316","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Waiting for Godot in Porto, directed by Gábor Tompa","authors":"Anita Rákóczy","doi":"10.3366/jobs.2023.0395","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/jobs.2023.0395","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41421,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43085033","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay explores Beckett’s engagement with Djuna Barnes, starting with their epistolary exchanges in the 1970s and working back to his reading of her work in the 1930s in order to position Barnes as yet another modernist woman writer who, along with Gertrude Stein, facilitated Beckett’s transition away from Joyce in the 1930s. It explores their shared connection with James Joyce before developing on two key comparative critical readings of their aesthetics by Tyrus Miller and Daniela Caselli in order to situate Barnes as a valid aesthetic counterpoint to Joyce, a development on the ‘Nominalism’ versus ‘Realism’ dyad Beckett establishes between Gertrude Stein and Joyce in the 1937 Kaun letter. Borrowing from Barnes’s own late reflection on Nightwood, this article builds on extant criticism of Beckett and Barnes to situate Barnes’s ‘histrionic’ and ‘verballistic’ writings within the constellation of women authors whose work facilitated the development of Beckett’s ‘literature of the non-word’, and an important progression on from the (Steinian) ‘nominalistic irony’ Beckett identifies in the 1937 Kaun letter as a ‘necessary’ step towards his desired aesthetics. The essay argues that Barnes’s work represents a significant point of contact within this transitional period in Beckett’s aesthetic development, and that his identification of Barnes’s work as ‘verballistic’ in 1938, specifically the ‘shattered’ surfaces visible therein, provided Beckett with a glimpse of ‘that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing’ so central to his post-1937 aesthetics.
{"title":"Unfathered Connections: Samuel Beckett and Djuna Barnes","authors":"Georgina Nugent","doi":"10.3366/jobs.2023.0388","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/jobs.2023.0388","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores Beckett’s engagement with Djuna Barnes, starting with their epistolary exchanges in the 1970s and working back to his reading of her work in the 1930s in order to position Barnes as yet another modernist woman writer who, along with Gertrude Stein, facilitated Beckett’s transition away from Joyce in the 1930s. It explores their shared connection with James Joyce before developing on two key comparative critical readings of their aesthetics by Tyrus Miller and Daniela Caselli in order to situate Barnes as a valid aesthetic counterpoint to Joyce, a development on the ‘Nominalism’ versus ‘Realism’ dyad Beckett establishes between Gertrude Stein and Joyce in the 1937 Kaun letter. Borrowing from Barnes’s own late reflection on Nightwood, this article builds on extant criticism of Beckett and Barnes to situate Barnes’s ‘histrionic’ and ‘verballistic’ writings within the constellation of women authors whose work facilitated the development of Beckett’s ‘literature of the non-word’, and an important progression on from the (Steinian) ‘nominalistic irony’ Beckett identifies in the 1937 Kaun letter as a ‘necessary’ step towards his desired aesthetics. The essay argues that Barnes’s work represents a significant point of contact within this transitional period in Beckett’s aesthetic development, and that his identification of Barnes’s work as ‘verballistic’ in 1938, specifically the ‘shattered’ surfaces visible therein, provided Beckett with a glimpse of ‘that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing’ so central to his post-1937 aesthetics.","PeriodicalId":41421,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43604155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Notes on Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.3366/jobs.2023.0397","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/jobs.2023.0397","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41421,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES","volume":"40 Suppl 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135721169","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay investigates deafness as an interfacial vehicle in Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable by extending original concepts in Deaf studies such as Deaf Gain, and DeafSpace. By looking at a Deaf-oriented rhetoric in the novel, the essay, firstly, explores the interfacial role of the half-deaf narrator in their textual oasis; and secondly, examines how the narrator would challenge the dominant binary of presence-absence within a phonocentric context wherein the deaf are mere anacoluthonic attendees. While the novel’s soundscape has attracted lavish criticism as a verbal chrysalis, its layers have rarely been examined for moments of audiological incommunicability wherein the deaf narrator, as the other, negates the text’s phonic democracy by adopting silence, internal monologue, and reversals as modes and means of Deaf Gain. To investigate the instance of deaf survival, the essay engages DeafSpace as an interstitial space of dwelling for an audiologically marginalised narrator who experiences deafness as a phasic, onto-phenomenological transformation.
{"title":"‘The sounds that reach me’: On Deafness as Interface in The Unnamable","authors":"Shahriyar Mansouri","doi":"10.3366/jobs.2022.0374","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/jobs.2022.0374","url":null,"abstract":"This essay investigates deafness as an interfacial vehicle in Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable by extending original concepts in Deaf studies such as Deaf Gain, and DeafSpace. By looking at a Deaf-oriented rhetoric in the novel, the essay, firstly, explores the interfacial role of the half-deaf narrator in their textual oasis; and secondly, examines how the narrator would challenge the dominant binary of presence-absence within a phonocentric context wherein the deaf are mere anacoluthonic attendees. While the novel’s soundscape has attracted lavish criticism as a verbal chrysalis, its layers have rarely been examined for moments of audiological incommunicability wherein the deaf narrator, as the other, negates the text’s phonic democracy by adopting silence, internal monologue, and reversals as modes and means of Deaf Gain. To investigate the instance of deaf survival, the essay engages DeafSpace as an interstitial space of dwelling for an audiologically marginalised narrator who experiences deafness as a phasic, onto-phenomenological transformation.","PeriodicalId":41421,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41746329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Happy Days International Beckett Festival","authors":"Alicia Nudler","doi":"10.3366/jobs.2022.0380","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/jobs.2022.0380","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41421,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42504827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}