Louise Bourgeois and Samuel Beckett were both from comfortably bourgeois families; both had a strained relationship with one parent and undertook psychoanalytic treatment while grieving the deaths of their fathers; both were academically successful and placed great emphasis on studying; both were marked by the First and Second World Wars; both experienced the disorientations and liberations of exile and working between languages; and finally, after a period of relative neglect, both achieved celebrity and critical acclaim later in life. Drawing on Bourgeois’s notebooks and diaries in her New York archive, in which Beckett makes fleeting appearances, this article presents a comparative reading of Bourgeois and Beckett, and identifies a significant number of affinities in their creative preoccupations and strategies, points of confluence that call into question assumptions by their respective critics that their creative practice is exceptional. A comparative reading with a female artist has the additional benefit of situating Beckett outside the masculinist heritage in which he has been inscribed, and brings into focus the gender bias that has been evident in both sets of scholarship. At once modernist and contemporary due to their longevity and the variety of their prolific output (over seventy years for Bourgeois and sixty for Beckett), Bourgeois and Beckett have both been successfully canonised: vital points of reference for artists and writers today, exhibitions and productions of their work also draw huge crowds. Their respective critics have hailed the work of Bourgeois and Beckett as remarkable and distinctive, setting them apart from their fellow artists and writers. They share a creative strategy, however: both dedicated themselves to a narrow range of themes and pursued these through the adoption of a diverse range of media, play with scale, and an unceasing experimentation with form.
{"title":"‘I do, I undo, I redo’: Louise Bourgeois and Samuel Beckett","authors":"J. Bates","doi":"10.3366/jobs.2023.0389","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/jobs.2023.0389","url":null,"abstract":"Louise Bourgeois and Samuel Beckett were both from comfortably bourgeois families; both had a strained relationship with one parent and undertook psychoanalytic treatment while grieving the deaths of their fathers; both were academically successful and placed great emphasis on studying; both were marked by the First and Second World Wars; both experienced the disorientations and liberations of exile and working between languages; and finally, after a period of relative neglect, both achieved celebrity and critical acclaim later in life. Drawing on Bourgeois’s notebooks and diaries in her New York archive, in which Beckett makes fleeting appearances, this article presents a comparative reading of Bourgeois and Beckett, and identifies a significant number of affinities in their creative preoccupations and strategies, points of confluence that call into question assumptions by their respective critics that their creative practice is exceptional. A comparative reading with a female artist has the additional benefit of situating Beckett outside the masculinist heritage in which he has been inscribed, and brings into focus the gender bias that has been evident in both sets of scholarship. At once modernist and contemporary due to their longevity and the variety of their prolific output (over seventy years for Bourgeois and sixty for Beckett), Bourgeois and Beckett have both been successfully canonised: vital points of reference for artists and writers today, exhibitions and productions of their work also draw huge crowds. Their respective critics have hailed the work of Bourgeois and Beckett as remarkable and distinctive, setting them apart from their fellow artists and writers. They share a creative strategy, however: both dedicated themselves to a narrow range of themes and pursued these through the adoption of a diverse range of media, play with scale, and an unceasing experimentation with form.","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":"45683442","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}
Seeing Barbara Bray was written as a sketch for a portrait of Barbara Bray, who met Samuel Beckett shortly after he sent the text of All That Fall to BBC's Third Programme. As script editor and producer, she consulted with the author on his first radio drama and collaborated on subsequent works broadcast by the BBC. From the early 1960s, Bray, based in Paris, worked mainly as a literary translator. Over time a strong bond between them developed and an intimate relationship ensued. Erudite and with a gift for rendering complex issues in the least complicated way, Bray provided Beckett with much more than translating advice, encouraging him in his writing, editing his texts, and acting as his “sounding board”. Very modest and discrete, she kept a low profile until her death in 2010. It was only with the publication of the two last volumes of The Letters of Samuel Beckett (2014, 2016 respectively), that her role in his life and writing became apparent to the general readership. In his personal account, Marek Kedzierski focuses principally on Beckett's letters to Bray, her comments on them, and on her unfinished memoir from which he quotes several passages. Drawing from conversations with her recorded by him in 2003-2009, his essay ends with Bray's personal confession revealing to us her deep pain and her refusal to be “the invisible woman” in Samuel Beckett's life.
{"title":"Seeing Barbara Bray: Marek Kędzierski on Barbara Bray – Barbara Bray on Samuel Beckett","authors":"Marek Kȩdzierski","doi":"10.3366/jobs.2023.0391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/jobs.2023.0391","url":null,"abstract":"Seeing Barbara Bray was written as a sketch for a portrait of Barbara Bray, who met Samuel Beckett shortly after he sent the text of All That Fall to BBC's Third Programme. As script editor and producer, she consulted with the author on his first radio drama and collaborated on subsequent works broadcast by the BBC. From the early 1960s, Bray, based in Paris, worked mainly as a literary translator. Over time a strong bond between them developed and an intimate relationship ensued. Erudite and with a gift for rendering complex issues in the least complicated way, Bray provided Beckett with much more than translating advice, encouraging him in his writing, editing his texts, and acting as his “sounding board”. Very modest and discrete, she kept a low profile until her death in 2010. It was only with the publication of the two last volumes of The Letters of Samuel Beckett (2014, 2016 respectively), that her role in his life and writing became apparent to the general readership. In his personal account, Marek Kedzierski focuses principally on Beckett's letters to Bray, her comments on them, and on her unfinished memoir from which he quotes several passages. Drawing from conversations with her recorded by him in 2003-2009, his essay ends with Bray's personal confession revealing to us her deep pain and her refusal to be “the invisible woman” in Samuel Beckett's life.","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":"43002601","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":"Samuel Beckett and Translation, ed. José Francisco Fernández and Mar Garre Garcia, and Translating Samuel Beckett around the World, ed. José Francisco Fernández and Pascale Sardin","authors":"P. Stewart","doi":"10.3366/jobs.2022.0376","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/jobs.2022.0376","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":"41967737","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}
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