Undoing time : the life and work of Samuel Beckett / Jennifer Birkett.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Birkett, Jennifer, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Beckett, Samuel, 1906-1989.

Beckett, Samuel.

Authors, Irish--20th century--Biography.

Authors, Irish.

Authors, French--20th century--Biography.

Authors, French.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xii, 226 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Sallins, Co. Kildare, Ireland : Irish Academic Press, 2015.

Summary:

Since his death in 1989, it has become difficult to imagine that Samuel Beckett was once a virtually unknown writer. Born in 1906 into a respectable middle-class family in a Dublin suburb, he came late to fame in the early 1950s with the ground-breaking play, Waiting for Godot. Since Godot, his writings has been translated, published, and staged throughout the world. This highly readable and original narrative account offers a new opportunity to engage with a towering figure of Irish, and world, literature. It discusses his most popular work in poetry, drama, prose, radio, and television along with his less familiar pieces. Original close readings explore his transformative work on language and form. For Beckett, life was a matter of doing time, while writing was a way of undoing it. In the process, writers, audiences, and readers enter into a different understanding of how it is to be human. Book jacket.

Contents:

A Life in Time 1

Human Time 4

Everybody's Beckett 7

Ireland's Beckett 10

Chapter 1 The Long Beginning (1928-46) 22

'James Joyce's White Boy' 22

Poetic Beginnings: Translating 24

Coming into His Own 28

The Writer in Wartime 34

The Poetry of the Subject: Lost in Time 37

Chapter 2 Beginning with Prose 43

The Apprentice 43

The Journeyman 50

Chapter 3 Refusing Mastery 71

Consuming, Composting, Composing 71

Impasse: The Rhythm of Contradiction 75

Another Way Through: The Turning of Worm 80

Chapter 4 The Shorter Prose - False Starts, Fresh Ends 87

Texts for Nothing: 'Under a Different Glass' 88

How It Is 91

'Eternally I': The Mobile Text 95

Chapter 5 Drama from Eleutheria to Happy Days 110

A Material Stage 110

Eleutheria: Subverting the Spectator 114

Waiting for Godot: Doing Time 118

Endgame: Playing to Lose 124

Krapp's Last Tape: 'Drowned in Dreams and Burning to be Gone' 128

Happy Days: The Dance of Love 132

Chapter 6 The Shorter Plays - Diminishing Returns 141

The Gender Gap 142

Watch this Space 154

Chapter 7 Broadcasting Beckett 165

Beckett on Radio 165

Beckett on Screen: Projecting Meaning onto the Void 187.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780716532903

0716532905

9780716532910

0716532913

OCLC:

912241338