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The Affects, Cognition, and Politics of Samuel Beckett’s Postwar Drama and Fiction: Revolutionary and Evolutionary Paradoxes theorizes the revolutionary and evolutionary import of Beckett’s works in a global context defined by increasingly ubiquitous and insidious mechanisms of capture, exploitation, and repression, alongside unprecedented demands for high-volume information-processing and connectivity. Part I shows that, in generating consistent flows of solidarity-based angry laughter, Beckett’s works sabotage coercive couplings of the subject to social machines by translating subordination and repression into processes rather than data of experience. Through an examination of Beckett’s attack on gender/ class-related normative injunctions, the book shows that Beckett’s works can generate solidarity and action-oriented affects in readers/ spectators regardless of their training in textual analysis. Part II proposes that Beckett’s works can weaken the cognitive dominance of constrictive “frames” in readers/ audiences, so that toxic ideological formations such as the association of safety and comfort with simplicity and “sameness” are rejected and more complex cognitive operations are welcomed instead—a process that bolsters the mind’s ability to operate at ease with increasingly complex, malleable, extensible, and inclusive frames, as well as with increasing volumes of information.
This collection of essays – the first volume in the Dialogue series – brings together new and experienced scholars to present innovative critical approaches to Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame. These essays broach a broad range of topics, many of which are inherently controversial and have generated significant levels of debate in the past. Critical readings of the play in relation to music, metaphysics, intertextuality, and time are counterpointed by essays that consider the nature of performance, the history of the theater and the music hall, Beckett’s attitudes to directing his play, and his responses to other directors. This collection will be of special interest to Beckett scholars, to students of literature and drama, and to drama theorists and practitioners.
This is the first book devoted Beckett's innovative work for the big- and small-screens. Herren examines each of Beckett's film and television plays in depth, emphasizing the central role that memory plays in these haunting works.
This book presents a new reading of Pina Bausch's dance theatre, orienting it within an international legacy of performance practice. The discussion considers not only the influence of German and American modern dance on Bausch's work but, crucially, interrogates parallels with modernist and postdramatic theatre (including Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Jerzy Grotowski, and Robert Wilson), the influence of which has been largely neglected in existing studies of her oeuvre. Pina Bausch's Dance Theatre provides a wide-ranging study of Bausch's aesthetic and methods of practice, with case studies ranging from the beginning of her career to her final choreographies.
A historical study of Chile's twin experiments with cybernetics and socialism, and what they tell us about the relationship of technology and politics. In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized—Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented—but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government—which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies. Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities. Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts; when we read them we are reading history.
The aim of this Element is to offer a reassessment of Beckett's alleged Cartesianism using the theoretical framework of extended cognition - a cluster of present-day philosophical theories that question the mind's brain-bound nature and see cognition primarily as a process of interaction between the human brain and the environment it operates in. The principal argument defended here is that, despite the Cartesian bias introduced by early Beckett scholarship, Beckett's fictional minds are not isolated 'skullscapes'. Instead, they are grounded in interaction with their fictional storyworlds, however impoverished those may have become in the later part of his writing career.
Research Paper from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, University of Balochistan (Department of English), course: Literature, language: English, abstract: Applying Derridean deconstructive hermeneutics to Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," the author of this paper introduces a new portrait of the personages of the play. The study will retrace the pathways of Western tradition of the metaphysics of presence and its compelling influences, which have proved to be the inhibiting and fossilizing deadlocks of aporia of meaning and authoritative structures of human thought to explore the new horizons. In its concluding mode, the study exposes preventive stumbling aporic blocks of centralized structure of the minds of characters in the given play. Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) is the most eminent French philosopher and literary theorist of deconstruction. He challenges the logocentric Western tradition of the metaphysics of pres-ence, which has been dominant from Plato's "Phaedrus" until Edmund Husserl's "Origin of Geometry" in Western philosophy. His trend-breaking theory of deconstruction attacks the metaphysical presuppositions of Western philosophy, ethics, culture, politics and literature. It may give a new meaning and perspective to Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," which has always been a focal point for the world's literary critics. They have applied various theories to it, but this paper tries to scrutinize the different facets of the play from Derridean deconstructive theory.
Fredric Jameson argues that Brecht's method was a multi-layered process of reflection and self-reflection, reference and self-reference, which allows individuals to situate themselves historically and think for themselves.
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). Irish dramatist and poet. His use of the stage and dramatic narrative and symbolism has revolutionalized drama in England.
In the shadow of the Holocaust, Samuel Beckett captures humanity in ruins through his debased beings and a decomposing mode of writing that strives to 'fail better'. But what might it mean to be a 'creature' or 'creaturely' in Beckett's world? In the first full-length study of the concept of the creature in Beckett's prose and drama, this book traces the suspended lives and melancholic existences of Beckett's ignorant and impotent creatures to assess the extent to which political value marks the divide between human and inhuman. Through close readings of Beckett's prose and drama, particularly texts from the middle period, including Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Anderton explicates four arenas of creaturely life in Beckett. Each chapter attends to a particular theme – testimony, power, humour and survival – to analyse a range of pressures and impositions that precipitate the creaturely state of suspension. Drawing on the writings of Adorno, Agamben, Benjamin, Deleuze and Derrida to explore the overlaps between artistic and political structures of creation, the creature emerges as an in-between figure that bespeaks the provisional nature of the human. The result is a provocative examination of the indirect relationship between art and history through Beckett's treatment of testimony, power, humour and survival, which each attest to the destabilisation of meaning after Auschwitz.