Revisioning Beckett: Samuel Beckett's Decadent Turn

Description

Revisioning Beckett reassesses Beckett's career and literary output, particularly his engagement with what might be called decadent modernism. Gontarski approaches Beckett from multiple viewpoints: from his running afoul of the Irish Censorship of Publications Acts in the 1930s through the 1950s, his preoccupations to "find literature in the pornography, or beneath the pornography," his battles with the Lord Chamberlain in the mid-1950s over London stagings of his first two plays, and his close professional and personal associations with publishers who celebrated the work of the demimonde. Much of that term encompasses an opening to the fullness of human experience denied in previous centuries, and much of that has been sexual or decadent. As Gontarski shows, the aesthetics that emerges from such early career encounters and associations continues to inform Beckett's work and develops into experimental modes that upend literary models and middle-class values, an aesthetics that, furthermore, has inspired any number of visual artists to re-vision Beckett.

S. E. Gontarski is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University, USA, where he edited the Journal of Beckett Studies from 1989 to 2008. He is the author or editor of 29 books. His editions of Beckett's writings include Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1928-1989 (1996), The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Volume IV: The Shorter Plays (1999), and The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Volume II: Endgame (1993). He has been awarded four National Endowment for the Humanities research grants, has twice been awarded Fulbright Professorships, and has been Guest Editor of the American Book Review, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Modern Fiction Studies, and Drammaturgia.

There is much here for scholars of Beckett, and more broadly of modernism, decadence, drama and performance studies, literary theory, censorship, and history of the book ... He foregrounds Beckett's modernist decadence as ever self-inventing and relating to the contemporary age. His discussions encourage important new lines of study, especially regarding performance studies, African American theater, prison theater, queer studies, and manuscript and archival studies, as well as attention to Beckett's later prose, poetry, and drama. * Journal of Modern Literature * Samuel Beckett is recognized as one who subverted the Modernist enterprise, not least by questioning the limits of language to create a reality with any stability prior to its own linguistic expression. The 'empirical turn' of the new century redefined a Beckett whose work (to echo Yeats) is not a rootless flower but the speech of a man. In Revisioning Beckett, S. E. Gontarski further confronts the 'decadent turn,' in a series of essays ranging from Beckett's close readings of Max Nordau and the Marquis de Sade, through his surreal confrontations with censorship ('knitted doilies' to conceal genital warts) and the changing fashions of figuration, to the absurdist paradoxes of creation by undoing. * Chris Ackerley, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Otago, New Zealand * This collection of Gontarski's recent essays is essential reading for Beckett scholarship and for studies of Irish modernism more generally. Gontarski combines thoughtful research with an encyclopedic knowledge of Beckett. All the essays are original, provocative and the product of clear and vigorous thinking. * Sam Slote, Associate Professor of English, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland * S. E. Gontarski brings a glorious variety of contexts - from modernist aesthetics to publishing and theatre practice - to bear in Revisioning Beckett. Underlying these absorbing re-enagements by a major critic is a conviction that the rich poverty of Beckett's art is nourished by Decadence: the abiding fascination of the abject and despised. The essays collected here mediate that fascination afresh for a new generation of Beckett scholars and readers. * Erik Tonning, Professor of British Literature and Culture, University of Bergen, Norway * It is the professional and theatrical lives Beckett led which are throwing up the real surprises [in this volume], and, thanks to Gontarski, these new stories are richly fascinating. Thank Godot for Stan Gontarski! -- Adam Piette * French Studies: A Quarterly Review * This collection of occasional pieces offers important articulations of a piece with Gontarski's sustained scholarship of over forty years. It is a compendium that offers numerous insights and interesting analyses largely accessible to the lay reader as well as to the Beckett scholar versed in Gontarski's previous critical work. -- Barry Allen Spence * Skene Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies *