Samuel Beckett And Experimental Psychology

Samuel Beckett's private writings and public work show his deep interest in the workings of the human mind. Samuel Beckett and Psychology is an innovative study of the author's engagement with key concepts in early experimental psychology and rapidly developing scientific ideas about perception, attention and mental imagery. Through innovative new readings of Beckett's later dramatic and prose works, the book reveals the links between his aesthetic method and the methodologies of experimental psychology through the 20th century. Covering important later works including Happy Days, Not I and Footfalls, Samuel Beckett and Psychology sheds important new light on Beckett's depictions of the workings of the embodied mind.

Samuel Beckett's private writings and public work show his deep interest in the workings of the human mind. Samuel Beckett and Psychology is an innovative study of the author's engagement with key concepts in early experimental psychology and rapidly developing scientific ideas about perception, attention and mental imagery. Through innovative new readings of Beckett's later dramatic and prose works, the book reveals the links between his aesthetic method and the methodologies of experimental psychology through the 20th century. Covering important later works including Happy Days, Not I and Footfalls, Samuel Beckett and Psychology sheds important new light on Beckett's depictions of the workings of the embodied mind.

The aim of this study is to suggest an interpretation of memory and forgetting in a selection of Samuel Beckett's plays. The main focus of interest is the protagonists' memory, whose interpretation is based on a psychological approach: Beckett makes creative use of experimental psychology in that he uses his protagonists' memory in numerous variations which all stress distinct aspects of this theme. The psychological approach of this study is complemented with the findings of gerontology which take account of the characteristics of the memory of the elderly.

Retracing the steps of a surprising array of 20th-century writers who ventured into the fantastical, topsy-turvy world of Lewis Carroll's fictions, this book demonstrates the full extent of Carroll's legacy in literary modernism. Testing the authority of language and mediation through extensive word-play and genre-bending, the Alice books undoubtedly prefigure literary modernism at its upmost experimental. The collection's chapters look beyond literary style to show how Carroll's writings had a far-reaching impact on modern life, from commercial culture to politics and philosophy. This book shows us the Alice we recognize from Carroll's novels but also the Alice modernist writers encountered through the looking-glass of these extraliterary discourses. Recovering a common touchstone between the likes of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, and writers conventionally regarded on the periphery of modernist studies, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Sylvia Plath, Jorge Luis Borges, Flann O'Brien, and Vladimir Nabokov, this volume ultimately provides a new entry-point into a more broadly conceptualised global modernism.

Examining the ways in which modernism is created within specific historical contexts, as well as how it redefines the concept of history itself, this book sheds new light on the historical-mindedness of modernism and the artistic avant-gardes. Cutting across Anglophone and less explored European traditions and featuring work from a variety of eminent scholars, it deals with issues as diverse as artistic medium, modernist print culture, autobiography as history writing, avant-garde experimentations and modernism's futurity. Contributors examine both literary and artistic modernism, combining theoretical overviews and archival research with case studies of Anglophone as well as European modernism, which speak to the current historicizing trend in modernist and literary studies.

What might behaviorism, that debunked school of psychology, tell us about literature? If inanimate objects such as novels or poems have no mental properties of their own, then why do we talk about them as if they do? Why do we perceive the minds of characters, narrators, and speakers as if they were comparable to our own? In Behaviorism, Consciousness, and the Literary Mind, Joshua Gang offers a radical new approach to these questions, which are among the most challenging philosophical problems faced by literary study today. Recent cognitive criticism has tried to answer these questions by looking for similarities and analogies between literary form and the processes of the brain. In contrast, Gang turns to one of the twentieth century's most infamous psychological doctrines: behaviorism. Beginning in 1913, a range of psychologists and philosophers—including John B. Watson, B. F. Skinner, and Gilbert Ryle—argued that many of the things we talk about as mental phenomena aren't at all interior but rather misunderstood behaviors and physiological processes. Today, behaviorism has relatively little scientific value, but Gang argues for its enormous critical value for thinking about why language is so good at creating illusions of mental life. Turning to behaviorism's own literary history, Gang offers the first sustained examination of the outmoded science's place in twentieth-century literature and criticism. Through innovative readings of figures such as I. A. Richards, the American New Critics, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and J. M. Coetzee, Behaviorism, Consciousness, and the Literary Mind reveals important convergences between modernist writers, experimental psychology, and analytic philosophy of mind—while also giving readers a new framework for thinking about some of literature's most fundamental and exciting questions.