This book focuses on a philosophical trajectory that not only had a profound impact on critical thought of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries, but on cosmopolitan, contemporary culture more broadly and on artistic experiment and expression in particular. The book explores how the work of Samuel Beckett intersects with such preoccupations of time as a ‘double headed monster’, of memory and multiplicity, of being and becoming that continue in an involutionary turn through the work of Gilles Deleuze. The book discusses Modernism; it examines the adaptations of Samuel Beckett's prose texts; it looks at the nature of memory, consciousness, dreams and perception; time and motion, intuition, and imagination.
The world around Tennessee Williams in the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s was changing at an astonishing pace, the cultural revolution of the period rendering most of his themes of sexual closeting and repression almost inconsequential. At least the entrenched cultural taboos against which he wrote seem to have disappeared by the mid-1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, Broadway productions of his work grew infrequent, while those mounted tended to have short runs. He told interviewers from Theatre Arts magazine: ‘I think my kind of literary or pseudo-literary style of writing for the theatre is on its way out.’ European productions of his work, on the other hand, seemed regenerative: Howard Davies’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1989), in which the director used Williams’s original third act and not the version rewritten by Elia Kazan for the New York premiere; Peter Hall’s revival of Orpheus Descending (1989–91); Benedict Andrews’s A Streetcar Named Desire (2014), followed by his 2017 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – a revival deemed ‘so courageous’; and in Italy, Elio De Capitani’s productions of Un tram che si chiama desiderio (1995) and Improvvisamente, l’estate scorsa (2011), both in fresh, new, up-to-date translations by Masolino D’Amico – all these have maintained an edge to Williams’s theatre lost in so many American productions. All seem to suggest the continued vitality of Williams’s work in Europe by directors willing to probe and rediscover Williams’s depths, who consider him ‘a playwright worthy of further artistic investigation’, as European audiences, correspondingly, seem less inclined to dismiss him as an artist whom history has overtaken. S. E. Gontarski is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. His critical, bilingual edition of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire was published as Un tram che si chiama desiderio / A Streetcar Named Desire (Pisa: Editioni ETS, 2012). His Włodzimierz Staniewski and the Phenomenon of ‘Gardzienice’, co-edited with Tomasz Wiśniewski and Katarzyna Kręglewska, is forthcoming (Routledge).
Beckett seems to have moved into television unprodded, uncoaxed by anything save the challenges of the medium, the difficulties of subsuming yet another machine to character, as he did with the tape recorder in Krapp's Last Tape and the motion-picture camera in Film. On his fifty-ninth birthday he began a new work, another monologue. It was familiar if painful matter, a man, also in his late fifties, alone in a room, and a voice in his head haunting him. As he was in Film, the protagonist is again concerned with avoiding perception and its consequence, being, and the opening mime of Eh Joe virtually repeats the early room sequence of Film (in fact, in a preliminary note to himself, a note which precedes even the first holograph version, Beckett had Joe spend the night in a chair as, presumably, O did). The plot is as simple as that of Film, which Beckett has described as follows: "one striving to see one striving not to be seen." Of Eh Joe Beckett has said: "It is his passion to kill the voices which he cannot kill." Beckett's comment, although simple, is also singular, since it seems to counter (or complete) the thrust of the play itself. In the text Joe has apparently smothered the voices of his mother and father, and is well on his way to stifling Voice. At least this is the information Voice reports. Beckett, however, seems to deny that possibility.
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