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Using Jacques Derrida's 1995 study, Archive Fever, Weiss examines how Samuel Beckett's Come and Go and Footfalls stage the failed acts of archiving. In both plays, memories are either unknown or not named. Either way, without being named they cannot be collected, catalogued or made public. Despite this, the women haunting his plays seem struck by archive fever. Ultimately, Beckett stages the tension between the desire to remain silent with the desire to archive.

Stage plays, “Come and Go” and “Footfalls” by Samuel Beckett, will be presented by ETSU’s Division of Theatre & Dance and ETSU Department of Literature and Language Oct. 7-9 at 7:30 p.m. and Oct. 10 at 2 p.m. in ETSU’s Bud Frank Theatre.

This groundbreaking collection from scholars and artists on the legacy of Beckett in contemporary art provides readers with a unique view of this important writer for page, stage, and screen. The volume argues that Beckett is more than an influence on contemporary art―he is, in fact, a contemporary artist, working alongside artists across disciplines in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond.The volume explores Beckett's formal experiments in drama, prose, and other media as contemporary, parallel revisions of modernism's theoretical presuppositions congruent with trends like minimalism and conceptual art. Containing interviews with and pieces by working artists, alongside contributions of scholars of literature and the visual arts, this collection offers an essential reassessment of Beckett's work. Perceiving Beckett's ongoing importance from the perspective of contemporary art practices, dominated by installation and conceptual strategies, it offers a completely new frame through which to read perennial Beckettian themes of impotence, failure, and penury. From Beckett's remains, as it were, contemporary artists find endless inspiration. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1182/thumbnail.jpg

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Review of Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians. by Hugh Kenner

This study addresses two works of fiction--Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies and J. M. Coetzee's Foe--and is separated into two chapters. The first chapter analyzes the indeterminate nature of postmodern space within the two novels as related to M. M. Bakhtin's idea of the chronotope found in his work The Dialogic Imagination. The second chapter addresses the self-reflexive creation of this postmodern space within each novel's hypodiegetic narratives and discussions of narrative creation within each respective diegetic narratives. In each novel, characters as authors create or discuss "inner" narratives that reflect upon the way chronotopes are created in fiction and reveal problematic aspects of those chronotopes. This narrative creation produces what I call a "postmodern creative chronotope" that self-reflexively embraces indeterminacy at the same time that it critiques the elements that produce this indefinite relationship between time and space, a strategy that is especially postmodern. I contextualize the discussion by introducing theories of postmodernism, specifically those of Jean-François Lyotard and Linda Hutcheon. Lyotard's claim that postmodernism resists totalizing structures and Hutcheon's contention that it engages in a simultaneous complicity and critique inform the relationships between time and space in both Beckett's and Coetzee's text. Additionally, theories of postmodern space contribute to the more specific discussion of the postmodern chronotopes in both novels. Spatial theorists like Edward Soja and Henri Lefebvre, among others, have attempted to reassert issues of space in what has been an ontological and epistemological framework that has prioritized time. Their reassertion of spatiality reconnects the two halves of the spatio-temporal framework of the chronotope in narrative. Beckett and Coetzee employ similar indeterminate and self-reflexive chronotopal strategies in their novels. Coetzee, however, inserts a number of global/political issues into his self-reflexive discussion of chronotopal creation and definition.

Cette recherche a pour but l'étude de situations traumatiques caractérisées par l'absence de langage. Il se penche plus précisément sur une évaluation du lien paradoxal entre l'expérience de mort psychique où le langage fait défaut et entre différentes expressions créatrices dans les arts (au théâtre chez Samuel Beckett, dans la poésie dans l'œuvre de Paul Celan et dans l'œuvre artistique de Francis Bacon), telles des trouvailles spécifiques au renouvellement du langage et de la vie. Cette démarche est soumise à la capacité de l'artiste de supporter la "mort psychique" et l'absence de représentation et de langage, ce que je nomme dans ce travail "le langage négatif", et d'en faire ressortir, par son art, des piliers qui formeraient un nouveau piédestal à la vie, à l'existence, à la créativité et à la découverte. Ce sujet a préoccupé le célèbre psychanalyste britannique Wilfred Bion et l'a amené à développer un ensemble de concepts théoriques et cliniques. Le modèle conçu dans cette recherche utilise les concepts théoriques et cliniques de Bion concernant les psychothérapeutes et psychanalystes et donne la possibilité de définir les différentes voies par lesquelles un artiste réussit à se servir de la créativité ou du processus de création comme étant un contenant (concept fondamental chez Bion) lui permettant d'accéder à des territoires et des domaines psychiques situés au-delà du langage. Dans une certaine mesure, différemment de Bion focalisé sur la thérapie, le modèle préconisé par cette présente recherche, fait essentiellement appel à la création artistique et à l'artiste au sein du processus créatif, comme étant le témoignage de son expérience dans "l'espace de mort". Il permet ainsi, non seulement de découvrir un "langage" propre à l'artiste mais aussi d'enrichir la théorisation thérapeutique psychanalytique de Bion, qui lui-même, tout comme Freud, admet que l'artiste devance le psychanalyste et parfois même lui trace la voie. / The purpose of this research was to study traumatic situations characterized by the absence of language. More specifically, the focus is on the paradoxical relation between the experience of "psychic death" in which language fails and on the other hand, different creative expressions in the arts (in the theatre of Samuel Beckett, in the poetic writings of Paul Celan, and the paintings of Francis Bacon), as well as specific discoveries recreating the possibility of language and even life. This act is made possible by the capability of the artist to support "psychic death" and absence of representation - named in this work "negative language", and to go through it by his art which recreates an access to life, creativity and new discoveries. This subject preoccupied the eminent British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion and led him suggest an abundance of new theoretical and clinical concepts. The model developed in the present research uses these conceptualizations of Bion concerning the psychotherapist and the psychoanalyst and applies it to the different ways that serve the artist to successfully use creative processes to form a container (a fundamental concept in Bion’s theories), and thus get access to territories and zones which are beyond common language. Bion focuses on therapy while the present model and research focuses on the artistic creation as a testimony coming back from the "region of death". It enables not only to find a "language" for the artist but also to enrich the psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic theorization of Bion, who admitted as Freud did that the artist precedes the psychoanalyst and even paves a new way.

This study constitutes an attempt to bring the notion of stupidity into relation with ethics and creativity, through a reading of Samuel Beckett's Endgame. Employing Emmanuel Lévinas' theories on ethics - the responsible responsiveness in regard to the Other and the concept of the Face - the objective is to demonstrate how stupidity, conceived as lack of control and knowledge, functions as a precondition for the ethical relation between humans, as well as that of the individual to her creativity.