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The papers in this volume challenge the concept of form and aim to set out, explore and develop different theories and examples of 'the formless'. In so doing, they raise questions of form, and notions of formlessness (as distinct from something called 'the formless'). The starting point for many of the contributors is Georges Bataille's highly influential article entitled 'informe' ('formless'). Here, in a context where art, philosophy and anthropology were merging, Bataille tried to question the idea of formlessness as simply applying to things without form. This book, through a diversity of articles in various domains, asks how and why 'the formless' is such a dominant idea from the nineteenth century onwards and it asks the question: 'what is formless?'
Samuel Beckett's works have spawned a great variety of critical - sometimes contradictory - interpretations, most recently ones stemming from postmodern theories of literature. In keeping with this trend, this book probes the relationship between Beckett's fiction and the work of a number of contemporary French thinkers, such as Maurice Blanchot and Gilles Deleuze, which demonstrates how concepts such as «the thought of the outside» and «the simulacrum» also generate Beckett's transgressive narrative. Beckett and French Theory provides valuable new knowledge and understanding to teachers and students of both Beckett's fiction and recent French critical theory.
SBT/A 19 features selected papers from the Borderless Beckett / Beckett sans frontières Symposium held in Tokyo at Waseda University in 2006. The essays penned by eminent and young scholars from around the world examine the many ways Beckett's art crosses borders: coupling reality and dream, life and death, as in Japanese Noh drama, or transgressing distinctions between limits and limitlessness; humans, animals, virtual bodies, and stones; French and English; words and silence; and the received frameworks of philosophy and aesthetics. The highlight of the volume is the contribution by Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee, the special guest of the Symposium. His article entitled "Eight Ways of Looki...
A history of fragmentary—or interrupted—writing in avant-garde poetry and prose by a renowned literary critic. In Interruptions: The Fragmentary Aesthetic in Modern Literature, Gerald L. Bruns explores the effects of parataxis, or fragmentary writing as a device in modern literature. Bruns focuses on texts that refuse to follow the traditional logic of sequential narrative. He explores numerous examples of self-interrupting composition, starting with Friedrich Schlegel's inaugural theory and practice of the fragment as an assertion of the autonomy of words, and their freedom from rule-governed hierarchies. Bruns opens the book with a short history of the fragment as a distinctive feature...
How can a movement like Surrealism be transferred, transplanted, or transported from one culture to another, one language to another? This book traces the creative dialogue between France and Japan in the early 20th century, focusing on Surrealist and avant-garde writings that challenge and break apart clear and bounded conceptions of language, poetry, and meaning.
The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett offers an accessible introduction to issues animating the field of Beckett studies today.
Michael Y. Bennett's accessible Introduction explains the complex, multidimensional nature of the works and writers associated with the absurd - a label placed upon a number of writers who revolted against traditional theatre and literature in both similar and widely different ways. Setting the movement in its historical, intellectual and cultural contexts, Bennett provides an in-depth overview of absurdism and its key figures in theatre and literature, from Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to Tom Stoppard. Chapters reveal the movement's origins, development and present-day influence upon popular culture around the world, employing the latest research to this often challenging area of study in a balanced and authoritative approach. Essential reading for students of literature and theatre, this book provides the necessary tools to interpret and develop the study of a movement associated with some of the twentieth century's greatest and most influential cultural figures.
The Test Drive deals with the war perpetrated by highly determined reactionary forces on science and research. How does the government at once promote and prohibit scientific testing and undercut the importance of experimentation? To what extent is testing at the forefront of theoretical and practical concerns today? Addressed to those who are left stranded by speculative thinking and unhinged by cognitive discourse, The Test Drive points to a toxic residue of uninterrogated questions raised by Nietzsche, Husserl and Derrida. Ranging from the scientific probe to modalities of testing that include the limits of friendship or love, this work explores the crucial operations of an uncontestable legitimating machine. Avital Ronell offers a tour-de-force reading of legal, pharmaceutical, artistic, scientific, Zen, and historical grids that depend upon different types of testability, involving among other issues what it means to put oneself to the test.
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 Becket...
Beckett’s Voices / Voicing Beckett uses ‘voice’ as a prism to investigate Samuel Beckett’s work across a range of texts, genres, and cultures. Twenty-one international contributors evaluate Beckett’s contemporary artistic legacy in relation to music, media, performance, and philosophy.