Beckett and Nothing: Trying to Understand Beckett - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0719080193 ISBN 13: 9780719080197

Publisher: Manchester University Press, 2010

Synopsis

The volume explores the paradoxes at the core of Beckett's poetics through the notion of 'nothing', analysed in its many incarnations in Beckett's prose works, plays, TV plays and adaptations.

About this title

About the Author

Daniela Caselli is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester.

From the Back Cover

Beckett and nothing invites its readership to understand the complex ways in which the Beckett canon both suggests and resists turning nothing into something by looking at specific, sometimes almost invisible ways in which 'little nothings' pervade the Beckett canon.

The volume has two main functions: on the one hand, it looks at 'nothing' not only as a content but also a set of rhetorical strategies: to reconsider afresh classic Beckett problems such as Irishness, silence, value, marginality, politics and the relationships between modernism and postmodernism and absence and presence. On the other, it focuses on 'nothing' in order to assess how the Beckett oeuvre can help us rethink contemporary preoccupations with materialism, neurology, sculpture, music, and television.

The volume is a scholarly intervention in the fields of Beckett studies which offers its chapters as case studies to use in the classroom. It will prove of interest to advanced students and scholars in English, French, Comparative Literature, Drama, Visual Studies, Philosophy, Music, Cinema and TV studies.

Edition details

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0719080193
• ISBN 13: 9780719080197
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296
• Editor: Caselli Daniela