Gathers the Nobel Prize winning poet and dramatist's short prose into one volume that affords the reader a view of Beckett's development as an artist.

Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett was one of the most profoundly original writers of the 20th century. He gave expression to the anguish and isolation of the individual consciousness with a purity and minimalism that have altered the shape of world literature. A tremendously influential poet and dramatist, Beckett spoke of his prose fiction as the "important writing," the medium in which he distilled his ideas most powerfully. Here, for the first time, his short prose is gathered in a definitive, complete volume by leading Beckett scholar S. E. Gontarski.

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 explosion of minimalism into the worlds of visual arts, music and literature in the mid-to-late twentieth century presents one of the most radical and decisive revolutions in aesthetic history. Detested by some, embraced by others, minimalism's influence was immediate, pervasive and lasting, significantly changing the way we hear music, see art and read literature. In The Theory of Minimalism, Marc Botha offers the first general theory of minimalism, equally applicable to literature, the visual arts and music. He argues that minimalism establishes an aesthetic paradigm for rethinking realism in genuinely radical terms. In dialogue with thinkers from both the analytic and continental traditions – including Kant, Danto, Agamben, Badiou and Meillassoux – Botha develops a constellation of concepts which together encapsulate the transhistorcial and transdisciplinary reach of minimalism. Illustrated by a range of historical, canonical and contemporary minimalist works of different media, from the caves of early Christian ascetics to Samuel Beckett's late prose, Botha offers a bold and provocative argument which will equip readers with the tools to engage critically with past, present and future minimalism, and to recognize how, in a culture caught between the poles of excess and austerity, minimalism still matters.

Samuel Beckett produced some of the most powerful writing – some of the funniest but most devastating – of the twentieth century. He described his plays, prose and poetry as ‘an unnecessary stain on the silence’, but the extraordinary combination of concision and richness in his writing stems from his peculiar sensitivity to the sounds and rhythms of words. Moreover, music forms a part of Beckett’s comic aesthetics of failure: it plays a role in his exploration of the possibilities and failures of the imagination, and the ever-failing attempt to forge a sense of self. No wonder, then, that so many composers have taken inspiration from Beckett, setting his words to music or translating into music the dramatic themes or contexts of his work. Headaches Among the Overtones considers both music in Beckett and Beckett’s significance in contemporary music. In doing so, it explores the relationship between words, music and meaning, examining how comparable philosophical concerns and artistic effects appear in literature and music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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.

For the first time in scholarship, this essay collection interprets modernity through the literary micro-genres of the aphorism, the epigram, the maxim, and the fragment. Situating Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde as forerunners of modern aphoristic culture, the collection analyses the relationship between aphoristic consciousness and literary modernism in the expanded purview of the long twentieth century, through the work of a wide range of authors, including Samuel Beckett, Max Beerbohm, Jorge Luis Borges, Katherine Mansfield, and Stevie Smith. From the romantic fragment to the tweet, Aphoristic Modernity offers a compelling exploration of the short form's pervasive presence both as a standalone artefact and as part of a larger textual and cultural matrix.

Reflecting the rich critical debate at the ‘Beckett and the State of Ireland’ conferences held in Dublin between 2011 and 2013, this volume brings together a selection of essays which explore and respond to the Irish concerns which echo in the fiction, drama, and poetry of Samuel Beckett. From the portrayals of the haunting landscape of South County Dublin in Beckett’s work to its interrogation of the political and social pieties of the infant nation state in which the author came to maturity, Beckett and the ‘State’ of Ireland uncovers the enduring presence of Ireland in one of the most influential bodies of writing in modern literature. Examining the politics of cultural identity, sexuality in the post-independence era, representations of disability in Beckett’s fiction and drama, Ireland’s culture of incarceration, the role of eugenics in the Irish cultural imagination, and the themes of exile and displacement in Beckett’s writing, amongst other concerns, Beckett and the ‘State’ of Ireland enriches understandings of the social, cultural, and political dimensions of Beckett’s work and introduces new and challenging perspectives to the study of Irish literature and culture.

Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath explores Beckett's literary responses to the political maelstroms of his formative and middle years: the Irish civil war and the crisis of commitment in 1930s Europe, the rise of fascism and the atrocities of World War II. Archive yields a Beckett who monitored propaganda in speeches and newspapers, and whose creative work engages with specific political strategies, rhetoric, and events. Finally, Beckett's political aesthetic sharpens into focus. Deep within form, Beckett models ominous historical developments as surely as he satirizes artistic and philosophical interpretations that overlook them. He burdens aesthetic production with guilt: imagination and language, theater and narrative, all parallel political techniques. Beckett comically embodies conservative religious and political doctrines; he plays Irish colonial history against contemporary European horrors; he examines aesthetic complicity in effecting atrocity and covering it up. This book offers insightful, original, and vivid readings of Beckett's work up to Three Novels and Endgame.

Original Scholarly Monograph