Samuel Beckett (1906 – 1989)
Related: 1900s literature - English literature - experimental literature
Titles: Watt (1953) - Samuel Beckett
Writers like Václav Havel, John Banville, Aidan Higgins and Harold Pinter have publicly stated their indebtedness to Beckett's example, but he has had a much wider influence on experimental writing since the 1950s, from the Beat generation to the happenings of the 1960s and beyond. [Jul 2006]
Biography
Samuel Barclay Beckett (April 13, 1906 – December 22, 1989) was an Irish playwright, novelist and poet. Beckett's work is stark, fundamentally minimalist, and deeply pessimistic about human nature and the human condition. His later work explores his themes in increasingly cryptic and attenuated style. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969 and elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett [Aug 2005]
Black comedy
A scene in Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot is a good example of black comedy: A man takes off his belt to hang himself, and his trousers fall down. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_comedy [Jun 2005]
Beckett's legacy
Of all the English-language modernists, Beckett's work represents the most sustained attack on the realist tradition. He, more than anyone else, opened up the possibility of drama and fiction that dispense with conventional plot, characterisation and the unities of place and time in order to focus on essential components of the human condition. Writers like Václav Havel, Aidan Higgins and Harold Pinter have publicly stated their indebtedness to Beckett's example, but he has had a much wider influence on experimental writing since the 1950s, from the Beat generation to the happenings of the 1960s and beyond. In an Irish context, he has acted as a major model and influence on writers like Trevor Joyce and Catherine Walsh who are writing in modes that look to the modernist tradition as an alternative to the dominant realist mainstream. Many major 20th-century-composers, including György Kurtág, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass or Heinz Holliger created musical works based on his texts. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett#Beckett.27s_legacy [Aug 2005]
Waiting for Godot (1952) - Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot (1952) - Samuel Beckett [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Waiting for Godot (sometimes subtitled: tragicomedy in 2 acts) is an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett, written in the late 1940s and first published in 1952 by Grove Press, after having been refused by more mainstream publishers. Beckett originally wrote Godot in French, his second language, as En attendant Godot (literally: While Waiting for Godot). The simplicity of the dialogue reflects this French origin. An English translation by Beckett himself was published in 1955. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot [Aug 2005]
see also: http://www.etymonline.com/
see also: modernist literature - Grove Press - fiction - 1952
Beckett's Boredom and the Place of Theory
Abstract What is the role of boredom in Beckett's art? Is it still a question of art? How does, for example, a particularly repetitious and mechanical passage in Watt relate to Benjamin's reflections on the aura of art? And how does it relate to Adorno's reflections on the spiritualisation effected by anti-art? Is the frustration of sensual pleasure in a boring passage eased by a meta-interpretation of the passage and is its boredom thereby ignored and its challenge to the pleasurability of art suppressed? Boredom is difficult to face. Heidegger's lengthy analysis of boredom in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics ends up making boredom interesting. For Heidegger, the interest of boredom is regrettable as it prevents boredom's revelation of the truth of time (boredom, Langeweile, is time in its extension, as a "long while", and thus in its difference from the atomistic "nows" of the derivative concept of time). But Heidegger is too critical of voluntarism, for one thing, to advocate giving oneself up to boredom. If there are problems with the theoretical recuperationi of boredom, it still has to be asked - but asked in what sense? - what the boredom in Beckett's text "does". --James Phillips, http://sites.uws.edu.au/uws/conferences/beckett/speakers/phillips.html
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