Samuel Beckett
Laughing Matters, Comic Timing
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Edinburgh University Press
Published:3rd Apr '12
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Reads Beckett's comic timing as part of a post-war ethics of representationSamuel Beckett is a funny writer. He is also an author whose work is taken to respond ethically to the unspeakable seriousness of the post-Holocaust situation. How can these two statements sit together?Ranging widely over Beckett's fiction, drama, and critical writings, and including readings of Murphy, the Trilogy, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, the late prose, and the late plays, the book demonstrates that it is through Beckett's comic timing that we can understand the double gesture of his art: the ethical obligation to represent the world how it is while, at the same time, opening up a space for how it ought to be.Key Features:* Presents innovative readings of the comedy found in Beckett's fiction, drama and critical writings* Spans Beckett's entire oeuvre, using published and unpublished sources* Engages with recent and contemporary philosophical approaches to literature, including work by Derrida, Badiou, Levinas, and Adorno* Makes a unique contribution to theoretical work on comedy and laughter* Provides a rigorous introduction to the theoretical debates surrounding the relationship between modernist literature and a post-war ethics of representation
A comparable emphasis upon serio-comic duality informs Laura Salisbury’s account of the role of humour in Beckett’s work, Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing. This timely reading of Beckett’s work in relation to comic theory includes an illuminating chapter on his literary frustrations in the 1930s, which figures this period as the crucible in which his later comic praxis was forged. The context of comic theory proves a useful means of plotting a course beyond the stand-off between the ‘antihumanist’ Beckett monopolized by late twentieth-century deconstruction and Christopher Ricks’s reactive emphasis upon the ‘humane’ Beckett (p. 7), since, as Salisbury notes, ‘comedy does not function simply as a form of consolation and acceptance’, but is also ‘impelled by a mastery, even a certain violence’ (p. 30). -- Chrissie van Mierlo * A Year's Work in English Studies *
It is a mark of the real brilliance of Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing that it should open these kinds of new interpretive possibilities, not only for an understanding of Beckett (crucial as this book will be for Beckett studies) but also for an understanding of the humour and culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. -- Alys Moody * Journal oif Beckett Studies, Vol. 23, No. 1 *
ISBN: 9780748647484
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
272 pages