Collects Stan Gontarski’s finest essays on the work of Samuel Beckett over a forty-year periodRepresenting a profound engagement with the work of Samuel Beckett, this volume gathers the very best of Stan Gontarski’s Beckett criticism on practical, theoretical and critical levels. Such a range suggests a multiplicity of approaches to a body of work itself multiple, produced by an artist who underwent any number of transformations and reinventions over his long writing career. Many of the essays collected here explore Beckett’s debt to his age, Beckett very much a product of a culture in transition, which change he would help foster. But much of Beckett’s creative struggle was to find a new way, his own way. Most of the essays that comprise this volume detail that struggle, toward a way we now call Beckettian.Key FeaturesIncludes 24 original essays divided into thematic sections: modernism, theory, editing, introducing, and performing and covers Beckett’s drama, staging, fiction, poetry and proseUnique collection of Beckett scholarship by a leading Beckett critic and theatre director brought together for the first timeNew introductory essay reflecting on the development of Beckett scholarship
S. E. Gontarski is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. He has published more than 40 books, including The Beckett Critical Reader: Archives, Theories and Translations (2012), The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts (2014), Creative Involution: Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze (2015), Beckett Matters: Beckett’s Late Modernism (2016) and Revisioning Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s Decadent Turn (2018).
Remains of the Modern: The Exhaustion of ThematicsTheory MattersBeckett’s Voice(s)From Unabandoned Works: Beckett’s Short Prose The Conjuring of Something Out of Nothing: Beckett’s ‘Closed Space’ Novels Beckett’s "Imbedded" Poetry and the Critique of GenreArt and Commodity: Beckett’s Commerce with Grove Press Texts MatterEditing BeckettA Century of Missed Opportunities: Editing an Accurate Editions of Samuel Beckett’s "Shorts" and other Textual MisadventuresStill at Issue after All These Years: The Beckettian Text, Printed and PerformedPerformance Matters‘That’s the Show’: Beckett and PerformanceReinventing BeckettStaging Beckett: Voice and/in Performance, Company, What Where, and EndgameSamuel Beckett and the ‘Idea’ of Theatre: Performance through Artaud and DeleuzeGreying the Canon: Beckett in Performance, Beckett as Performing‘I think this does call for a firm stand’: Beckett at the Royal Court
Beckett Matters is testimony to a lifetime of work and criticism, providing an engaging collection and an excellent resource to any researcher or student within the ever-flourishing and evolving field of Beckett studies.