The Reader makes readily available for the first time 17 major, previously uncollected significant essays from the Journal of Beckett Studies from 1992 to the present.

The Reader makes readily available for the first time 17 major, previously uncollected significant essays from the Journal of Beckett Studies from 1992 to the present.

This work relates the adventures of an unnamed narrator crawling through the mud while dragging a sack of canned food. It is written as a sequence of unpunctuated paragraphs divided into three sections.

Writer Samuel Beckett (1906–89) is known for depicting a world of abject misery, failure, and absurdity in his many plays, novels, short stories, and poetry. Yet the despair in his work is never absolute, instead it is intertwined with black humor and an indomitable will to endure––characteristics best embodied by his most famous characters, Vladimir and Estragon, in the play Waiting for Godot. Beckett himself was a supremely modern, minimalist writer who deeply distrusted biographies and resisted letting himself be pigeonholed by easy interpretation or single definition. Andrew Gibson’s accessible critical biography overcomes Beckett’s reticence and carefully considers the writer’s work in relation to the historical circumstances of his life. In Samuel Beckett, Gibson tracks Beckett from Ireland after independence to Paris in the late 1920s, from London in the ’30s to Nazi Germany and Vichy France, and finally through the cold war to the fall of communism in the late ’80s. Gibson narrates the progression of Beckett’s life as a writer—from a student in Ireland to the 1969 Nobel Prize winner for literature—through chapters that examine individual historical events and the works that grew out of those experiences. A notoriously private figure, Beckett sought refuge from life in his work, where he expressed his disdain for the suffering and unnecessary absurdity of much that he witnessed. This concise and engaging biography provides an essential understanding of Beckett's work in response to many of the most significant events of the past century.

Bringing together seminal writings on Beckett from the 1950s and 1960s with critical readings from the 1980s and 1990s, this collection is inspired by a wide variety of literary-theoretical approaches and covers the whole range of Beckett's creative work. Following an up-to-date review and analysis of Beckett criticism, fifteen extracts of Beckett criticism are introduced and set in context by editors' headnotes. The book aims to make easily accessible to students and scholars stimulating and innovative writing on the work of Samuel Beckett, representing the wide range of new perspectives opened up by contemporary critical theory: philosophical, political and psychoanalytic criticism, feminist and gender studies, semiotics, and reception theory.

A powerful, genre-defying meditation, with Beckett at its origin, that touches on mysteries as varied as literary celebrity, baseball, and why we feel the need to be cruel to one another Following the schema of Samuel Beckett's unpublished "Long Observation of the Ray," of which only six manuscript pages exist, poet and critic Michael Coffey interleaves multiple narratives according to an arithmetic sequence laid out by Beckett in his notes. This rhythm of themes and genres--involving personal memoir, literary criticism, Beckett studies, contemporary political reportage and accounts of state-sponsored torture in appropriated texts, plus an Arabian Tale and even a baseballplay-by-play--produce a work at once sculptural, theatrical, mathematical and above all lyrical, a new form of narrative answering to a freshened rule set. In executing Beckett's most radical undertaking--one scholar referred to "Long Observation of the Ray" as a "monument to extinction"--Coffey gives readers access to an open field in which ruminations on writing mix with an engagement with Beckett scholarship as well as the unsettling chaos in today's world. Although Beckett, like any writer, had his share of abandoned works, he was in the habit of "unabandoning" on occasion. Coffey's effort here salvages a Beckett project from a half-century ago and brings it to the surface, with the contemporary markings of its hauling.

Representing a profound engagement with the work of Samuel Beckett, this volume gathers the very best of Stan Gontarski's Beckett criticism on practical, theoretical and critical levels. Such a range suggests a multiplicity of approaches to a body of work itself multiple, produced by an artist who underwent any number of transformations and reinventions over his long writing career.a Many of the essays collected here explore Beckett's debt to his age, Beckett very much a product of a culture in transition, which change he would help foster. But much of Beckett's creative struggle was to find a new way, his own way.a Most of the essays that comprise this volume detail that struggle, toward a way we now call Beckettian.