Pop Beckett

Addressing their shared passion for literature, art, and music, this book documents how Samuel Beckett and David Bowie produce extraordinarily empathetic creative outputs that reflect the experience and the effect of alienation. Through an exploration of their artistic practices, the study also illustrates how both artists articulate shared forms of human experience otherwise silenced by normative modes of representation. To liberate these experiences, Bowie and Beckett create alternative theatrical, musical, and philosophical spaces, which help frame the power relations of the psychological, verbal, and material places we inhabit. The result is that their work demonstrates how individuals are disciplined by the implicitly repressive social order of late capitalism, while, simultaneously, offering an informed political alternative. In making the injunctions of the social order apparent, Beckett and Bowie also transgress its terms, opening up new spaces beyond the conventional identities of family, nation, and gender, until both artists finally coalesce in the quantum space of the posthuman.

The essays in this collection provide in-depth analyses of Samuel Beckett's major works in the context of his international presence and circulation, particularly the translation, adaptation, appropriation and cultural reciprocation of his oeuvre. A Nobel Prize winner who published and self-translated in both French and English across literary genres, Beckett is recognized on a global scale as a preeminent author and dramatist of the 20th century. Samuel Beckett as World Literature brings together a wide range of international contributors to share their perspectives on Beckett's presence in countries such as China, Japan, Serbia, India and Brazil, among others, and to flesh out Beckett's relationship with postcolonial literatures and his place within the 'canon' of world literature.

In the 1930s, a young Samuel Beckett confessed to a friend that he had been living his life according to an ‘abject self-referring quietism’. Andy Wimbush argues that ‘quietism’—a philosophical and religious attitude of renunciation and will-lessness—is a key to understanding Beckett’s artistic vision and the development of his career as a fiction writer from his early novels Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Murphy to late short prose texts such as Stirrings Still and Company. Using Beckett’s published and archival material, Still: Samuel Beckett’s Quietism shows how Beckett distilled an understanding of quietism from the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, E.M. Cioran, Thomas à Kempis, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and André Gide, before turning it into an aesthetic that would liberate him from the powerful literary traditions of nineteenth-century realism and early twentieth-century high modernism. Quietism, argues Andy Wimbush, was for Beckett a lifelong preoccupation that shaped his perspectives on art, relationships, ethics, and even notions of salvation. But most of all it showed Beckett a way to renounce authorial power and write from a position of impotence, ignorance, and incoherence so as to produce a new kind of fiction that had, in Molloy’s words, the ‘tranquility of decomposition’.

Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction provides an overdue investigation into Beckett’s rich influences over American writing. Through in-depth readings of postmodern authors such as Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster and Lydia Davis, this book situates Beckett’s post-war writing of exhaustion and generation in relation to the emergence of an explosive American avant-garde. In turn, this study provides a valuable insight into the practical realities of Beckett’s dissemination in America, following the author’s long-standing relationship with the countercultural magazine Evergreen Review and its dramatic role in redrawing the possibilities of American culture in the 1960s. While Beckett would be largely removed from his American context, this book follows his vigorous, albeit sometimes awkward, reception alongside the authors and institutions central to shaping his legacies in 20th and 21st century America.

Since the publication of the first edition of Industrial Chocolate Manufacture and Use in 1988, it has become the leading technical book for the industry. From the beginning it was recognised that the complexity of the chocolate industry means that no single person can be an expert in every aspect of it. For example, the academic view of a process such as crystallisation can be very different from that of a tempering machine operator, so some topics have more than one chapter to take this into account. It is also known that the biggest selling chocolate, in say the USA, tastes very different from that in the UK, so the authors in the book were chosen from a wide variety of countries making the book truly international. Each new edition is a mixture of updates, rewrites and new topics. In this book the new subjects include artisan or craft scale production, compound chocolates and sensory. This book is an essential purchase for all those involved in the manufacture, use and sale of chocolate containing products, especially for confectionery and chocolate scientists, engineers and technologists working both in industry and academia. The new edition also boasts two new co-editors, Mark Fowler and Greg Ziegler, both of whom have contributed chapters to previous editions of the book. Mark Fowler has had a long career at Nestle UK, working in Cocoa and Chocolate research and development – he is retiring in 2013. Greg Ziegler is a professor in the food science department at Penn State University in the USA.

What do Bono, Seinfeld and Apple have in common? Nothing. However, it’s the nothing of Samuel Beckett, which is something. Bold and provocative, Beckett’s works and even his image are a potent force in modern society. Shoes, marketing, baby names—all fall under his spell. This collection of new essays (one exception) finds him incorporated into virtually all aspects of popular culture—television, popular fiction, movies, tattoos, even sports—in a manner that seems to defy classifying. Is it image-making or image-taking? Why is our culture so obsessed with an obscure Irish writer most people have not read? Each essay provides a unique appraisal of Beckett’s branding.

Exploring Beckett's relationship with the visual arts and its influence on his creative expression

BOOKS 5-8 OF THE CRIMSON POINT SERIES: ROCKY GROUND A single mother who has been hurt too many times… And the former Royal Marine determined to capture her heart. BROKEN BONDS Autumn winds and rain have returned to Crimson Point. But this year a different kind of storm is looming. DEADLY VALOR She’s been targeted by a killer. He’s the only man who can save her. DANGEROUS SURVIVOR She’s come back to face her demons. He’s the only man who can keep her safe.