Beckett Joyce And The Art Of The Negative

This collection presents articles that examine Joyce and Beckett’s mutual interest in and use of the negative for artistic purposes. The essays range from philological to psychoanalytic approaches to the literature, and they examine writing from all stages of the authors’ careers. The essays do not seek a direct comparison of author to author; rather they lay out the intellectual and philosophical foundations of their work, and are of interest to the beginning student as well as to the specialist.

Surreal Beckett situates Beckett‘s writings within the context of James Joyce and Surrealism, distinguishing ways in which Beckett forged his own unique path, sometimes in accord with, sometimes at odds with, these two powerful predecessors. Beckett was so deeply enmeshed in Joyce’s circle during his early Paris days (1928 - late 1930s) that James Knowlson dubbed them his "Joyce years." But Surrealism and Surrealists rivaled Joyce for Beckett’s early and continuing attention, if not affection, so that Raymond Federman called 1929-45 Beckett’s "surrealist period." Considering both claims, this volume delves deeper into each argument by obscuring the boundaries between theses differentiating studies. These received wisdoms largely maintain that Beckett’s Joycean connection and influence developed a negative impact in his early works, and that Beckett only found his voice when he broke the connection after Joyce’s death. Beckett came to accept his own inner darkness as his subject matter, writing in French and using a first-person narrative voice in his fiction and competing personal voices in his plays. Critics have mainly viewed Beckett’s Surrealist connections as roughly co-terminus with Joycean ones, and ultimately of little enduring consequence. Surreal Beckett argues that both early influences went much deeper for Beckett as he made his own unique way forward, transforming them, particularly Surrealist ones, into resources that he drew upon his entire career. Ultimately, Beckett endowed his characters with resources sufficient to transcend limitations their surreal circumstances imposed upon them.

Paying close attention to the extensive network of allusions Beckett derived from Joyce's writing, P.J. Murphy reveals how Beckett consistently echoed and engaged in dialogue with Joyce's works.

Proposes that a distinct strain of literary modernism emerged in Europe in response to historical catastrophe.

'The danger is in the neatness of identifications', Samuel Beckett famously stated, and, at first glance, no two authors could be further distant from one another than William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett. This book addresses the vast intertextual network between the works of both writers and explores the resonant correspondences between them. It analyses where and how these resonances manifest themselves in their aesthetics, theatre, language and form. It traces convergences and inversions across both œuvres that resound beyond their conditions of production and possibility. Uncovering hitherto unexplored relations between the texts of an early modern and a late modern author, this study seeks to offer fresh readings of single passages and entire works, but it will also describe productive tensions and creative incongruences between them.

Rethinking Children and Families considers the way we approach the complex relationship between childhood, families and the state, and explores the contested nature of the terms childhood, family and state. Theoretical and practice-based perspectives are discussed within the context of recent key developments. Examples of research, reflections on research and key points and guidance on further reading make this a really accessible text. Rethinking Children and Families is essential reading for those studying childhood at undergraduate and graduate level, and will be of great interest to those working with children in any field.

The dozen essays brought together here, alongside a newly-written introduction, contextualize and exemplify the recent 'empirical turn' in Beckett studies. Characterized, above all, by recourse to manuscript materials in constructing revisionist interpretations, this approach has helped to transform the study of Samuel Beckett over the past generation. In addition to focusing upon Beckett's early immersion in philosophy and psychology, other chapters similarly analyze his later collaboration with the BBC through the lens of literary history. Falsifying Beckett thus offers new readings of Beckett by returning to his archive of notebooks, letters, and drafts. In reassessing key aspects of his development as one of the 20th century's leading artists, this collection is of interest to all students of Beckett's writing as well as ' historicist' scholars and critics of modernism more generally.

Although Beckett scholarship has in recent decades experienced a renaissance as a result of various poststructuralist approaches that tend to emphasize destabilization and inexpressibility as the defining features of Beckett’s output, relatively little attention has been paid to the ethical aspects of his aesthetics of failure. This book fits into that renaissance, but draws on a distinct, though rarely addressed, connection that Samuel Beckett’s work shares with that of Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas. It is within this philosophical context that the significance of Beckett’s aesthetics of failure becomes most visible. Beckett’s work can be described as one of gradual reduction and disintegration of language, a stripping away of the tools rendering expression at all possible for the sake of approaching the inexpressible. Traditional representation yields to silence and linguistic aporia; language yields to images of absence and emptiness. The primary purpose of this study is to trace this movement of ‘unwording’ and analyze the role inexpressibility plays in Beckett’s prose in its visual, linguistic and ethical manifestations, as the aesthetics of inexpressibility is intrinsically bound with the ethical responsibility of literature understood as maintaining a relation with alterity.