Beckett's Thing: Painting and Theatre

by David Lloyd

Overview

Beckett was deeply engaged with the visual arts and individual painters, including Jack B. Yeats, Bram van Velde, and Avigdor Arikha. In this monograph, David Lloyd explores what Beckett saw in their paintings.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474431491
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	02/22/2018
Series:	Other Becketts
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

David Lloyd is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. His most recent books are Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (2019) and Beckett’s Thing: Theatre and Painting (Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2016).

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Painted Stage: Beckett's Visual Aesthetics
1. Republics of Difference: Yeats, MacGreevy, Beckett
2. Beckett's Thing: Bram Van Velde and the Gaze
3. "Siege laid again": Arikha's Gaze, Beckett's Painted Stage
Conclusion: The Play's the Thing
Bibliography.

What People are Saying About This

This highly original constellation of critical dialogues will galvanise Beckett Studies. David Lloyd both disturbs and enhances emerging debates in and among philosophical, ethical, aesthetic and political discourses, as they respond to pressures arising from neo-liberalization on understandings of human subjectivity and its representability. This book reconfigures how Samuel Beckett’s work will be seen and read across a range of fields of enquiry.

Victor Merriman

This highly original constellation of critical dialogues will galvanise Beckett Studies. David Lloyd both disturbs and enhances emerging debates in and among philosophical, ethical, aesthetic and political discourses, as they respond to pressures arising from neo-liberalization on understandings of human subjectivity and its representability. This book reconfigures how Samuel Beckett’s work will be seen and read across a range of fields of enquiry.

Editorial Reviews

Lloyd's study of Aeikha is of a very high order, penetratingly rich in its detailed readings of paintings and drawings...this review fails to capture what cannot be summarized: the rich close readings of superb paintings that demonstrate by their performance both the power of aesthetic experience and what it is to see.
— James McNaughton, A Digital Journal of Irish Studies

From the Publisher

refreshing, compelling, and contagious... Beckett’s Thing is not a survey of dozens of texts, nor is it an homage, nor does it dwell in biography. Rather, it traces one theme and tackles it so deeply and thoroughly as to make usthink about Beckett anew.

Modernism/modernity, Volume 27, Number 2, April 2020 - Andrew Kincaid

Lloyd’s study of Aeikha is of a very high order, penetratingly rich in its detailed readings of paintings and drawings…this review fails to capture what cannot be summarized: the rich close readings of superb paintings that demonstrate by their performance both the power of aesthetic experience and what it is to see.

A Digital Journal of Irish Studies James McNaughton

This highly original constellation of critical dialogues will galvanise Beckett Studies. David Lloyd both disturbs and enhances emerging debates in and among philosophical, ethical, aesthetic and political discourses, as they respond to pressures arising from neo-liberalization on understandings of human subjectivity and its representability. This book reconfigures how Samuel Beckett’s work will be seen and read across a range of fields of enquiry.

Victor Merriman