Beckett at 100

The year 2006 marked the centenary of the birth of Nobel-Prize winning playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett. To commemorate the occasion, this collection brings together twenty-three leading international Beckett scholars from ten countries, who take on the centenary challenge of "revolving it all": that is, going "back to Beckett"-the title of an earlier study by critic Ruby Cohn, to whom the book is dedicated-in order to rethink traditional readings and theories; provide new contexts and associations; and reassess his impact on the modern imagination and legacy to future generations.
These original essays, most first presented by the Samuel Beckett Working Group at the Dublin centenary celebration, are divided into three sections: (1) Thinking through Beckett, (2) Shifting Perspectives, and (3) Echoing Beckett. As repeatedly in his canon, images precede words. The book opens with stills from films of experimental filmmaker Peter Gidal and unpublished excerpts from Beckett's 1936-37 German Travel Diaries, presented by Beckett biographer James Knowlson, with permission from the Beckett estate.
Renowned director and theatre theoretician Herbert Blau follows with his personal Beckett "thinking through." Others in Part I explore Beckett and philosophy (Abbott), the influences of Bergson (Gontarski) and Leibniz (Mori), Beckett and autobiography (Locatelli), and Agamben on post-Holocaust testimony (Jones). Essays in Part II recontextualize Beckett's works in relation to iconography (Moorjani), film theoretician Rudolf Arnheim (Engelberts), Marshall McLuhan (Ben-Zvi), exilic writing (McMullan), Pierre Bourdieu's literary field (Siess), romanticism (Brater), social theorists Adorno and Horkheimer (Degani-Raz), and performance issues (Rodríguez-Gago). Part III relates Beckett's writing to that of Yeats (Okamuro), Paul Auster (Campbell), Caryl Churchill (Diamond), William Saroyan (Bryden), Minoru Betsuyaku and Harold Pinter (Tanaka) and Morton Feldman and Jasper Johns (Laws). Finally, Beckett himself becomes a character in other playwrights' works (Zeifman). Taken together these essays make a clear case for the challenges and rewards of thinking through Beckett in his second century.

Readership: Scholars and students of Beckett and modernist and postmodern literature

Edited by Linda Ben-Zvi, Professor of Theatre Studies and Professor Emerita, English and Theatre, Tel Aviv University; Colorado State University, and Angela Moorjani, Emerita Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics (French), University of Maryland-UMBC

"The book's approach is clear and highly readable" - Ben Poore, NTQ

Images: For Ruby Cohn
Peter Gidal: Still for Ruby
James Knowlson: Beckett the Tourist: Bamberg and W:urzburg
Part I. Thinking through Beckett
Herbert Blau: Apnea and True Illusion: Breath(less) in Beckett
David Houston Jones: From Contumacy to Shame: Reading Beckett's Testimonies with Agamben
Carla Locatelli: Projections: Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape and Not I as Autobiographies
H. Porter Abbott: "I am Not a Philosopher"
S. E. Gontarski: Recovering Beckett's Bergsonism
Naoya Mori: No Body Is at Rest: The Legacy of Leibniz's Force in Beckett's Oeuvre
Part II. Shifting Perspectives
Angela Moorjani: Bounded Boundlessness: Reflecting on Counterpoint and Iconography in Beckett's Play
Enoch Brater: Beckett's Romanticism
Matthijs Engelberts: Film and Film: Beckett and Early Film Theory
Anna McMullan: Beckett's Theatre: Embodying Alterity
J:urgen Siess: Beckett's Posture in the French Literary Field
Irit Degani-Raz: The Spear of Telephus in Krapp's Last Tape
Antonia Rodríguez-Gago: Refiguring the Stage Body through the Mechanical Re-Production of Memory
Part III. Echoing Beckett
Minako Okamuro: Words and Music,...but the clouds..., and Yeats's "The Tower"
Catherine Laws: Beckett—Feldman—Johns
Mariko Hori Tanaka: Ontological Fear and Anxiety in the Theatre of Beckett, Betsuyaku, and Pinter
Mary Bryden: The Mid-Century Godot: Beckett and Saroyan
Linda Ben-Zvi: Beckett, McLuhan, and Television: The Medium, the Message, and "the Mess"
Elin Diamond: Beckett and Caryl Churchill along the Moebius Strip
Julie Campbell: Beckett and Paul Auster: Fathers and Sons and the Creativity of Misreading
Hersh Zeifman: Staging Sam: Beckett as Dramatic Character
Contributors
Index