Theatre Of The Absurd Research Articles

Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution (review)

Reviewed by: Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution Gregory Byala Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution. By Pascale Casanova , Gregory Elliott. , London: Verso, 2006; pp. 119. $23.95 cloth. Writing in response to the existential-humanist tradition in Beckett scholarship, Pascale Casanova argues that Beckett's real achievement is not his affirmation of the human spirit, but his development of a purely abstract literature that refers to nothing outside of its own compositional practice: Far from being frozen in the bombast consubstantial with the rhetoric of Being, Beckett more than anyone else was concerned with aesthetic modernity. From the Second World War onwards, he deliberately situated himself in relation to the whole literary and pictorial avant-garde he mixed with in Paris—and definitely not Existentialism or the Theatre of the Absurd, whose presuppositions were alien to him. [13] Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution was published originally in France in 1997 under the title, Beckett l'abstracteur. Anatomie d'une révolution littéraire. The translation promotes Casanova's subtitle to title, thereby stressing the historicist side of her argument over the formalist. This reconfiguration helps to explain Terry Eagleton's introduction, which praises Casanova's attempt to situate Beckett in what Eagleton calls "a certain material history—one which is largely the history of his native Ireland" (4). For Eagleton, everything in Beckett, including his concern for the body, his flirtation with bicycles, and his obsession with tramps, can be traced to Irish sources. The only exception (and it is a very large one) is Beckett's rationalism, which Eagleton admits has no precursor in Irish literature or philosophy. By contrast, Casanova's Beckett is more predictably Irish. Her reading of him makes no reference to Maturin, Edmund Burke, or Flann O'Brien (as Eagleton's does). Instead, Casanova discovers a rather commonplace Beckett, one who is struggling both to avoid the antiquarianism of the Celtic twilight (symbolized most potently by Yeats) and to move beyond, or beneath, the literary escape route provided by Joyce. Casanova's Beckett is therefore hardly Irish at all; he is distinctly cosmopolitan in his interests, as the following quotation on the relationship between Joyce and Beckett makes clear: Dante was therefore their first intellectual bond, the first indication of a common endeavour to escape from what they felt was the fate of Irish confinement, a sign of cosmopolitan inclinations, the mark of an identical refusal of a purely nationalist aesthetic, which they alone could detect in one another when they met in Paris. [46] The appearance of this study in English is motivated by the recent critical desire to see Beckett as either a distinctly Irish writer or, at the very least, as "the Irish European." The dialogue that takes place between Eagleton's introduction and Casanova's text is therefore fascinating because it demonstrates the degree to which both Irish studies and the concept of Irish modernism have evolved in the past decade. Undoubtedly, the highpoint of Casanova's study is her reading of Worstward Ho, a text that has been underrepresented in the critical literature to date and that she sees as the "magisterial conclusion to the whole oeuvre" (16). Casanova is at her best when she remains close to Beckett's language, allowing her formidable strengths as a reader to emerge in concert with her sense of Beckett as an author who is attempting to bring into literature the kind of abstraction available in modern painting, music, and sculpture: "in Worstward Ho there are no longer any concessions to the ultimate conventions of literary realism, no longer things or places" (21). As Casanova describes it, the novel is "a pure object of language, which is totally autonomous since it refers to nothing but itself" (26). Absent from her reading, however, is any mention of the lines from Shakespeare's King Lear that help to explain the futility of Beckett's attempts at both abstraction and conclusion: "the worst is not, / So long as we can say, 'This is the worst'" (4.1.26–27). Even in the moments when he is struggling hardest to efface the possibility of narrative and arrive at a literature of the...

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop: Recent Reissues of British Electronic Music From 1955–1996

With the CD release this year by the British Library of Samuel Beckett's seven works written for BBC radio comes a chance to reevaluate the commercial releases from the effects studio that made these recordings possible, the British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC) Radiophonic Workshop. The Radiophonic Workshop (RW) was the BBC's in-house electronic music studio from 1958 to 1998. During those years, the workshop's largely anonymous composers wrote thousands of works for television and exerting an enormous influence on the development of electronic music in both the popular and, to a lesser extent, academic realms. For millions of people, including musicians and composers such as The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Luciano Berio, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and more recently, Orbital and the Pet Shop Boys, the RW was British electronic music. The kind of primitive but effective electronic tape music and effects employed in several of Beckett's works, available now for the first time on CD, quickly shifted to a more mainstream tonal style, before finally settling on a purely synthesizer-based model of composition by the early 1970s. This essay will sample a collection of recordings and DVDs from throughout the RW's history. In the beginning, the RW was in some ways the equivalent of the more famous Groupe de recherches musicales formed by Pierre Schaeffer for the production of musique concrete at the Parisian Radiodiffusion television francaise. The two studios initially shared similar methods of musical production, i.e., tape manipulation of recorded sounds and minimal electronic generation. In this, both studios differed from the predominantly electronically generated works emerging from the Westdeutscher Rundfunk studio as populated by composers like Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Both the French and German studios, however, were accompanied by associated schools of composition; Schaeffer's complex system of objets sonores guided his studio's output, and the Germans saw their music as the continuation of the development of serial techniques. No such philosophical mandate controlled the direction of the RW's productions. Rather, owing to the overwhelmingly hostile reaction both French and German electronic music received from within the BBC's Music Department, individuals from within that same organization's Drama and Features Departments worked to create a commensurate electronic studio in Britain. Working outside the heated contemporary musical debates of the time, these two departments were able to forge a studio free from the particular ideological musical forces at work on the Continent. Two BBC producers in particular were the driving force behind its creation, broadcasting several early experiments in electronic music as part of dramatic productions. Douglas Cleverdon and Donald McWhinnie found inspiration in Schaeffer's experimentation with manipulated sounds, seeing a vast new area of fit for exploration. The growing desire in the mid-1950s for a wider array of effects in dramatic productions reflected a larger desire by British producers and playwrights for a new kind of production: what McWhinnie called pure radio, a blending of spoken dialogue, effects, and music into an entirely organic whole, and only possible in the medium of radio. (1) The emergence and popularity of a revolutionary new avant-garde continental theatre in the mid-fifties, the Theatre of the Absurd, gave these producers a new willingness to invest their productions with an anti-realist aesthetic that embraced techniques geared towards the odd, surreal, and distorted. This world, borrowed and expanded upon from comedy and science fiction, existed as a bridge between music and reality. By alienating its audience from a familiar reality, the works combined electronics and words in a way unique to Britain. The first of the productions utilizing radiophonic sound (the name chosen by the BBC for these new electro-musical effects in an attempt to avoid comparison with both Germanic elektronische Musik and French musique concrete) to gain serious critical and popular attention was Beckett's All That Fall (1957), the first play on the British Library's CD collection and Beckett's first work specifically for the medium of radio. …

Film beyond boundaries: film, migrant narratives and other media

Film beyond boundaries: film, migrant narratives and other media

Oh Joy! Oh Rapture!: The Enduring Phenomenon of Gilbert and Sullivan (review)

Oh Joy! Oh Rapture! Enduring Phenomenon of Gilbert and Sullivan. By Ian Bradley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. [xii, 220 p. ISBN 0-19-516700-7. $29.95.] Index, notes. In this book, Ian Bradley, author of Complete Annotated Gilbert & Sullivan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), reports on, and attempts account for, the persistence of Gilbert and Sullivan. Why should such quintessentially Victorian theater still appeal citizens of our bewildered and noisy postmodernist world? For [d]espite being periodically written off as anachronisms by their detractors, he notes, . . [they] have not just survived but positively thrived into the twenty-first century (p. vii). Bradley's analysis of this matter is largely sociological; he agues that the Savoy operas make a particular appeal men, lawyers, Methodists, and intellectuals. Meanwhile, the author contradicts himself, for elsewhere he notes their popularity among women, Jews, children, and working class folk. Plainly, a deeper understanding is needed. If art endures past the boundaries of the specific time and place in which it was created, there must be something in it which transcends sociology in the ordinary, limited sense of the word. An on-going aesthetic need in humanity, just so, must be met. Unfortunately, here Bradley gets mushy. When he tries define this culturetranscending quality he is uplifting, but vague. We come back, he writes, to that quality of divine emollient and that indefinable but unmistakably spiritual essence which are at the heart of Gilbert and Sullivan's (p. 204). More troublingly, he seems argue that people care for the work of Gilbert and Sullivan out of various forms of mental insufficiency. He says their work provides an escape from the disorder and complexity of reality (p. 107). And on the same page he cites, with apparent approval, the association of care for Gilbert and Sullivan with autism, and the pursuit of the inconsequential. truth is different. As the great American philosopher Eli Siegel explained, art arises from the sanest possibility of mind-our ability make a one of opposites, find honest coherence where, ordinarily, we do not feel it. operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, far from embodying neurosis, are instead radiant, if wildly imaginative, studies in the beauty and integrity of mind. In these operas we find the oneness of disorder and order, the trivial and the grand. Far from escaping from complexity and disorder, Gilbert's plots positively revel in them. Gilbertian universe is topsy-turvy and logical at once. Well, so is the number pi-the irrational number that makes possible the most perfect geometric form: the circle. To Bradley's credit, he quotes several authors and Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiasts whose sense of aesthetics is clearer and more profound than his own. Among these is Gayden Wren, whose A Most Ingenious Paradox: Art of Gilbert & Sullivan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) is a serious attempt investigate the interplay between poet and composer-biographically, and in terms of the technical interaction of word and melody. Another person of insight is Andrea Atherton, the head of music and drama, at a St. Mary's Catholic High School in Astley, England, who sees Gilbert as a forerunner of the absurdist theatre of the twentieth century (p. 148). When we turn, however, from aesthetics the other task Bradley has assigned himself-that of giving historical documentation for The Enduring Phenomenon of Gilbert and Sullivan-the author seems a different person. Here he is on solid ground, having done magnificent research. book focuses on the world of Gilbert and Sullivan since 1961-that watershed year in which the copyright of the libretti the Savoy operas expired. For this period, Bradley reports on a vast range of theatrical productions, collegiate, amateur, or professional. He tells about the Carl Rosa opera, the Buxton International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival, the Glasgow Orpheus Club, Opera della Luna, the Gilbert and Sullivan Yiddish Light Opera company of Long Island, the Godalming Operatic Society, the Savoy Company of Philadelphia, the New York G & S Players, various high-school productions, college productions, church productions, the attempt at a Mikado in Japanese-and much, much more, including detailed information about such rarities as the 1993 Virginia Opera's presentation of The NOT Mikado, a 'hip-hop opera' set in contemporary Japan and patterned on Saturday Night Live (p. …

After Beyond Comes The Future : Freud's Absurdist Theatre of Reason

is any worst book! It isn't even a book of Freud. It's the book of an old man. Besides Freud is dead now, and believe me, the genuine Freud was really a great man. I am particularly sorry that you didn't know him better. Freud criticizes Me Future of an Illusion IN THE SPRING OF 1927 FREUD BEGAN WORK on the Future The Future of an Illusion, finished it in September, and published it in November. It is by all accounts a slight book, unoriginal in its condemnation of religion and not very well strung together conceptually. It is also considered one of the least Freudian of all of Freud's works, for in it Freud mounts an uncharacteristically optimistic defence of Logos, Greek god of Reason, against the forces that make religion possible, namely biological instinct, infantilism, and anxiety about the external world. This is certainly not the grumpy, pessimistic, tragic Freud we find almost everywhere else in his work, including three years later in Civilization and Its Discontents. This is Freud as Enlightenment philosopher, uncompromising defender of rationality and scientific progress. Consequently, Freud's own harsh assessment of the book comes as no surprise. In October Of 1927, referring to the advance proofs of his manuscript, Freud admitted to Sandor Ferenczi that The Future already strikes me as childish, I basically think differently, consider this work analytically frail and insufficient as a confession (Correspondence 326). This is quite a litany of complaints, even fatal complaints--so much so that we might ask why Freud wrote the book and then, more curiously, bothered to publish it. After all, Freud had in the recent past set aside works that failed to meet his standards. In what follows I examine this work in light of Freud's self-critical remarks and make an unusual claim. While The Future is indeed a disappointment, Freud's self-critical remarks of October 1927 are entirely caught within its logic; indeed, they faithfully repeat its tone and rhetoric. Hence the paradox: if Freud's self-critical remarks of The Future are indeed a feature of The Future, then that self-criticism implicates and invalidates itself. It therefore follows that we shouldn't be satisfied with Freud's complaint that the work is simply childish, unFreudian, analytically weak, and insufficient as a confession. I will argue just the opposite, namely that the work is in some ways fully mature, quintessentially Freudian, and analytically unimpeachable. Moreover, The Future is abundantly confessional and, in that mode, requires that readers attend not only to its ideas but to the self-presentation of those ideas. In fact, I will attempt to demonstrate that Freud's self-presentational, self-referential, and performative gestures provide the best window on both the internal and external stakes of this work--from its hermeneutic inside to that outside called institutional politics. What it reveals is a work less concerned with religion than with a handful of seemingly tangential concerns: identity, reason, conscience, cruelty, guilt, and authority. 1. The Structure of The Future With one exception, and perhaps not even then, Freud's late work on culture and society is made possible by a brooding theoretical work of 1920, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The one exception may be The Future of an Illusion, which is at least superficially more closely aligned in theory and spirit with The Ego and the Id of 1923. This is certainly interesting, since The Future was the very first of Freud's late cultural works. As such, it is an inaugural work that seems aberrant. Of course, it was only when The Future was relegated to the past that commentators, including Freud himself, could appreciate the shift in emphasis it announced. The best reckoning can be found in Freud's 1935 Postscript to an older work of 1925, An Autobiographical Study:' In it Freud acknowledges that a significant change occurred in the early to mid 1920s. …

Art Truth & Politics: Excerpts from the 2005 Nobel Lecture

Drawing by Maria Johnson Harold Pinter is generally regarded as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the twentieth century. That he occupies a position as a modern classic is illustrated by his name entering the language as an adjective used to describe a particular atmosphere and environment in drama: Pinteresque. Pinter restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of one another and pretense crumbles. With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution. Pinter's drama was first perceived as a variation of absurd theater but has later more aptly been characterized as comedy of menace, a genre in which the writer allows us to eavesdrop on the play of domination and submission hidden in the most mundane of conversations. In a typical Pinter play, we meet people defending themselves against intrusion or their own impulses by entrenching themselves in a reduced and controlled existence. Another principal theme is the volatility and elusiveness of the past. Harold Pinter was born on October 10, 1930, in the London borough of Hackney, son of a Jewish dressmaker. After being evacuated from London during World War n, he attended Hackney Grammar School, where he played Macbeth and Romeo in productions directed by Joseph Brearley. Deciding to choose a career in acting, in 1948 he was accepted at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and in 1951 enrolled at the Central School of Speech and Drama. That same year, he won a place in Anew McMaster's famous Irish repertory company, renowned for its performances of Shakespeare. Pinter toured again between 1954 and 1957, using the stage name of David Baron. After publishing his first poems in 1950, Pinter made his playwriting debut in 1957 with The Room, presented in Bristol. Other early plays were The Birthday Party (1957), at first a fiasco of legendary dimensions but later one of his most performed plays, and The Dumb Waiter (1957). His conclusive breakthrough came with The Caretaker (1959), followed by The Homecoming (1964) and other plays. Many critics have divided Pinter's drama into an initial period of psychological realism; a second, more lyrical phase featuring such plays as Landscape (1967) and Silence (1968); and finally a third, political phase in One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), The New World Order (1991), and other plays. But this division into periods seems oversimplified and ignores some of his strongest writing, such as No Man's Land (1974) and Ashes to Ashes (1996). In fact, the continuity in his work is remarkable, and his political themes can be seen as a development of the early Pinter's analyzing of threat and injustice. Since 1973, Pinter has won recognition as a defender of human rights alongside his writing, often taking stands seen as controversial. Pinter has also written radio plays and screenplays for film and television. Among his best-known screenplays are those for The Servant (1963), The Accident (1967), The Go-between (1971) and The Trench Lieutenant's Woman (1981, based on the John Fowles novel). Pinter has also made a pioneering contribution as a director. [Courtesy of the Swedish Academy]

Inciting Reflection

Inciting Reflection

Sobre el teatro del absurdo (de Juan del Encina a Juan Mateu)

From the analysis of a few comic devices of the absurd in Don Juan Tenorio «El refugiao» —a parodical play by exiled playwright Juan Mateu, first performed in Toulouse in 1958—, this article aims at showing that a tradition is still alive —a tradition that can, non only be traced back to La venganza de don Mendo by Munoz Seca (who did not, as has been claimed, invent the theatre of the absurd), but which is also part of an old trend stemming from Juan del Encina's famous Disparates , which has been exemplified by the burlesque plays of the seventeenth century, which was obvious in the nineteenth and early twentieth century popular liking for parodical drama, and which is still today one of the sources of what could be called humour the Spanish way.

Occupation: a theatre of the absurd

Occupation: a theatre of the absurd

The last avenue of the ‘Other’ Europe. The Stalinist universe of the Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin

There are cities that lie on a border, and others that accommodate borders and are formed by these. Political events have robbed these cities of a part of their reality, such as their hinterland, their tight bond with the rest of the national territory. History has torn deep gashes in their fabric and made a world stage of their everyday life, turning them into a theatre of the absurd. In these cities, one experiences, in an extraordinary manner, the duality of the border and its positive and negative effects in accordance with whether the borders are open or closed, rigid or flexible, anachronistic, protective or destructive.

‘A theatre of ruins’. Edward Bond and Samuel Beckett: theatrical antagonists

The playwright Edward Bond has long made known his antagonism to dramatists allied to Martin Esslin's Theatre of the Absurd. The work of Samuel Beckett has come in for particular criticism by Bond. Using published writings (and unpublished correspondence between myself and Bond), I hope to trace the development of this antagonism between ‘Bondian’ and ‘Beckettian’ views of theatre. However, this article will also set out to argue that both early work such as The Pope's Wedding (1962), and more recent work such as Coffee (1995), make use of motifs, characters and ideas from Beckett's theatre. The article will set out provisional reasons why Bond, despite his misgivings, is not averse to incorporating elements from Beckett's ‘theatre of ruins’, as he terms it, into his own work.

George Oppen: The New or the Avant-Garde?

George Oppen:The New or the Avant-Garde? Peter Nicholls (bio) Passage between Anglo-American and European notions of the avant-garde has never been easy; indeed, with the publication in English of Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde in 1984, readers in Britain and America were suddenly invited to see their literary traditions as singularly lacking in genuine avant-garde activity. Bürger's book proposed a radical differentiation of the two previously cognate terms, modernism and the avant-garde, construing twentieth-century culture as a falling away from the achievements of the historical avant-gardes (dada and surrealism) into the compromised domain of the merely "new." The dust of ensuing debates has settled now, of course, and Bürger's argument seems less compelling and more contradictory than it once did. At the same time, though, the terms he put in play may help us to understand how American writers have sometimes found that it is only through the failure or "death" of the avant-garde that an authentically 'new' poetics has been able to emerge. My example here is George Oppen, a poet whose scepticism about the avant-garde is worth taking seriously in view of his parallel commitment to a poetics of the new. Why did Oppen, with his left-wing politics and his unshakeable belief in the transformative power of poetry, distance himself so deliberately from any claim to avant-gardism? One answer to that question lies in Oppen's complicated reaction to an event that took place in 1969. On March 21 of that year, the Living Theater group organised by Julian Beck and Judith Malina held a symposium on "Theater or Therapy?" at the Friends Meeting House on Gramercy Square in New York.1 Advocates of anarchy, drugs and nudity, The Living Theater had by this time achieved notoriety for their commitment to a spontaneous, Artaudian aesthetic that sought "pure theater" in the violent conflation of art and reality.2 [End Page 1] Some five hundred people attended the event, including Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Stephen Spender, Stanley Kunitz and Norman Mailer. Reactions to The Living Theater's tactics were mixed, however. Critic Robert Brustein, who had previously praised the group for its ability to, as he put it, "break down barriers between what was going on onstage and what was going on in life," now spoke critically of their "anti-intellectual" bias (Tytell 158, 257–8).3 Brustein's contribution to the panel was followed by one from Paul Goodman who in "cautious and moderately conservative tone" argued that contemporary America was confronting not a revolutionary moment but one analogous to the Protestant Reformation. It didn't take long for members of the Living Theater and the Theater of the Absurd to show their disapproval. Discussion was quickly drowned by chants of "Stop analyzing! Start living!"; a woman's fur coat was seized and handbags overturned in the auditorium. Bent on destroying "illusory" theatrical space and ensuring that spectators "confront the real world through conscious decision-making" (Aronson 120), actors roamed the crowd, screaming obscenities at the audience and the speakers and spitting at everyone they encountered. Caught up in the mêlée was Harvey Shapiro, poet, editor of the New York Times Magazine, and an old friend of George Oppen. Two days later, Shapiro wrote Oppen a letter in which he puzzled over his own ambivalence toward the events of the evening. He couldn't help feeling, he said, that for all the chaos something portentous had been expressed, particularly in the theater group's aggressive response to one young man who had tried to speak about poetry: "All words," they'd screamed, "dead words by dead people" (Shapiro, Unpublished Letter). The point of the tirade, observed Shapiro, "as far as I can understand it, was to demonstrate that theater is happening all the time, that it does not take place in a theater under authoritarian direction, that it is created by people freed of their blocks, and therefore an evening of discussion (lousy words) such as this is absurd & shd [sic] not take place." The hostility to language and to "discussion" confirmed a tendency in the...

Multilingualism in Italy Past and Present by Anna Laura Lepschy , Arturo Tosi (review)

228 Reviews Poetry gets a chapter to itself,but theatre only figuresthrough Theatre of the Absurd in the chapter on experimental writing, and there is no discussion of autobiography except in so far as it features in autobiographical fiction. There is little that is overtly revisionisthere, either in the account of principal trends oftwentieth-century French literature or in the choice of authors fordiscussion. The roll-call of important writers runs from Proust and Gide through to Perec and Tournier, taking in Apollinaire, Bonnefoy, Ponge, Eluard, Sartre, Camus, Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Colette, Beauvoir, Duras, and Cixous along the way. Inevitably in a book such as this, there is not enough space forsome authors who might have a claim for inclu? sion, such as Valery, Claudel, Cocteau, Mauriac, Giraudoux, or Malraux. Only one francophone author is discussed (Djebar), and the chapter on recent fiction focuses on three works, Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance, Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes, and Djebar's Les Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement. Throughout, the author high? lights existential, experiential aspects of literature, so that even the most experimental writing is shown to be engaging with important issues as it strains to find new ways to express the traumas of the twentieth century. Literature emerges as a medium in which the possibilities and limits of ideas, identity, and experience can be explored. This is not primarily intended forthe specialist; rather it attempts to demonstrate to a less expert readership that French literature of the twentieth century is not as remote from our day-to-day concerns as it might sometimes appear. The touch is light and the more obscure quirks of critical languages are either avoided or explained. The book has the virtues of elegance, reliability, and accessibility, and it can be recommended with confidence to students who are new to the field. It should become a standard feature on introductory bibliographies for literature of the last century. University of Warwick Colin Davis Multilingualism in Italy Past and Present. Ed. by Anna Laura Lepschy and Arturo Tosi. Oxford: Legenda. 2002. x + 22opp. ?35. ISBN 1-900755-78-5. This interesting collection of articles derives from papers delivered at the Italian Cultural Institute in London on 20 October 2001, on the occasion ofthe Italian Lan? guage Week, under the auspices of the Italian Foreign Ministry and the Accademia della Crusca. Each paper in the volume, edited by Anna Laura Lepschy and Arturo Tosi, offersa stimulating reading on central questions in Italian linguistics, covering subjects from the formation of the language and the role of written and spoken Ita? lian in Italy and abroad, to contemporary issues of dialectology, sociolinguistics, and translation in the context of the European Union. The firstchapter, on 'The Italian of Renaissance Elites in Italy and Europe', by Brian Richardson, looks into the differenttypes of Italian available to members of the elites and to those of lower status in the fifteenthand sixteenth centuries, from both a written and a spoken point of view. The second chapter, by the late Joe Cremona, deals with 'Italian-Based Lingua Francas around the Mediterranean' in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, tackling 'a role of Italian almost wholly ignored by the historians of language, [. . .] that of being the chief diplomatic language between Europeans and Turks in the whole of the vast Ottoman Empire' (p. 26) and Italian's status as 'default language' (p. 27) in French and English consular documents of the time from Tunis and Tripoli. The two subsequent chapters explore the notion of multilingualism: Martin Maiden deals with the 'Definition of Multilingualism in Historical Perspective' (Chap? ter 3) and Mair Parry with 'The Challenges of Multilingualism Today' (Chapter 4). Nigel Vincent's 'Benvenuto Terracini and the Problem of Language Death' (Chap? ter 5) revisits, with original insights, a 1951 article by Terracini, reflectingalso on his MLRy ioo.i, 2005 229 position in the history of the realism versus idealism debate within Italian linguistics (see in particular pp. 67-69). Language-endangerment issues are as pressing as ever fiftyyears after Terracini's analysis: if?according to figures given by David Crystal in his Language Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)?we...

THE CRITICAL ASPECTS OF BECKETT’S TRILOGY

Beckett's name is associated with the absurd theatre and literature of exhaustion and silence. But he has remarkable interest in criticism and literary theory. His Dante ... Bruno. Vico .. Joyce (1929) and Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (1965). The present article attempts to read his Trilogy (IVlolloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable^ from this perspective. The first part is introductory as it discloses the critical insights explicitly stated about the language, self, philosophy and existence. The second section deals with the contro versial issues of language and narration, especially Beckett's use of narrators whose physical status is abnormal, but whose tales are con vincing enough. Beckett's Trilogy (1959) has never ceased stirring heated controversy among critics and scholars. This is partly due to the literary mode it represents (metafiction or anti-novel) and the startlingly pessimistic view. Man here loses nearly all human qualities: identity, name and character. The only thing that keeps him going is the language, the ability to describe and identify things. This last tie to human existence is what is striking in the whole Trilogy. As a metafiction, the novel consciously turns into a treatise where Beckett's ideas of philosophy, culture and the process of writ ing are investigated in detail. The present concentration here is on the critical insights that eventually render the Trilogy almost a critical text paving the way for the philosophical views of the poststructuralists and deconstructionists. Beckett's interest in critical activities dates back to the days when he was a student in Ireland where he had a great admiration for his former French professor, T. B. Rudmose-Brown (Mercier, 35). His great interest in French language and literature turns out to be a deci sive force in Beckett's future. Indeed, his two seminal critical texts

Coercion

Coercion

Italian Grotesque Theater

This is the first book in English to explore Italian grotesque in the twentieth century. Chiarelli's The Mask and the Face Antonelli's A Man Confronts Himself, and Cavacchioli's The Bird of Paradise have been widely staged in Europe and the Americas by prominent directors, including Pirandello. These playwrights exercised a pivotal role in stage renewal, forged links with the most avant-garde contemporary thinking, and, some of them at least, set the pace for what became, much later, theater of the absurd.

Retail Theater

Retailers selling very different types of merchandise are adopting the phrase retail theater in their public descriptions of their offers. The contribution of this article is an assessment of the use of the theater metaphor in retailing, especially with respect to the theatrical stage settings designed to create specific intended effects on audiences. Four forms of theater—theatrical realism, political realism, surrealism, and absurd theater—are used as examples. From the analysis of the theatrical performances, it is seen that the role of the audience is always considered explicitly; the role is different in different forms of theater, and writers and directors are clear as to the role that they would like audiences to adopt in a given performance. Such an approach can be translated into retailing. Examples are given of the intended customer (audience) effects, which can be created from retailing versions of the four theater styles.

‘There's Our Catastrophe’: Empathy, Sacrifice, and the Stageing of Suffering in Beckett's Theatre

In his seminalThe Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin suggested that Samuel Beckett, in denying his characters individualized facets of humanity, achieved an ‘alienation effect’ that was more profound and assured than Brecht's. Here, Michael David Fox, while agreeing that Beckett denies actors and audiences the kinds of identification achieved in naturalistic drama through Stanislavskian techniques, argues that he demands a different quality of empathy from his audiences – not through the artifice of a character's simulated pain but through the actuality of the performer's physical suffering. While analyzing the demands and constraints upon actors which Beckett imposes in his better-known plays, he also re-evaluates the more ‘occasional’ pieceCatastrophe– written in 1982 ostensibly as a homage to the then-imprisoned Czech playwright Vaclav Havel – less as a critique of political terror than as an ironic and devastating self-critique of the terror of Beckett's own tragic representation. Michael David Fox is a doctoral student in drama and critical theory in the Joint Doctoral Program in Drama at the University of California, Irvine and the University of California, San Diego. His dissertation is on the production of empathy in Shakespeare's tragedies. He wishes to thank Robert Weimann, Wolfgang Iser, and Gabriele Schwab for their helpful and generous comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

Things That Happened by Boris s> Slutsky G. S. Smith (review)

148 SEER, 79, I, 2001 character in 7hreeSisters(p. 36) and anybody who did not know TheCherry Orchard could be forgiven for believing that the play concerns Ranevskaia's relations with her husband, her son and her lover, there being 'very little action in the traditional sense [... .] Ranevskaia'shusband dies of drink, her son drowns [and] her lover robs her' (p. 43). Pishchikis describedas having a 'tendency of putting himself to sleep' (p. 42) whilst the charactersare seen to be 'trappedin a kind of limbo that is not only spiritual,but often material,and even economic' (p. 35, emphases added). The author also quotes, uncritically, (in addition to supplying the wrong page reference)J. L. Styan's claim that there are no less than fifty off-stage characters in the play, including 'gardeners'.To cap it all, 7The Cherry Orchard is described as 'an example of a new genre, one that points to the absurdity of twentieth-century theatre' (p. 47) when presumablywhat is meant is Theatre of theAbsurd. In case this should seem unfair to Ms Kot, her impressive list of 'Works Cited' runsto twentypages (infact the endnotes, bibliographyand index take up fortypages nearly one third the length of the actual text) and she does give the impression of being very knowledgeable about Polish dramatists.In fact, one wonders why she did not base her study on the unknown and littleknown [to thisreviewer]names thatshecites.At itsbest, the bookis intelligent and informed;at itsworst it is both intellectuallyimmodest and expressively/ theoreticallybizarre.Bewailingthe styleof Tantalus and apparentlyforgetting that what is being describedis a play, Kot complains that, 'likethe flickering of an impressionist'spaintbrush, Ivanov [sic] dots the text with these tiny motifs [i.e. words] [...] that from a distance help create a subtle whole. However, when the recipientconfrontsthem up close, the image disintegrates and each recipient loses himself in the little blobs of roots that dance before his eyes on the page' (p. 12I). All in all, the book has about it an air of imaginativelyingenuous and dubiously-theorizedprovisionality. Department ofHumanities andCultural Studies NICK WORRALL Middlesex University Slutsky,Boris. 7hingsthatHappened. Edited,translatedandwithanIntroduction and Commentaries by G. S. Smith. Glas New Russian Writing, i9. Birmingham University,Birmingham,I999. Vi+314pp. Illustrations. Index. [ I.99. THE contribution to Slavonicstudiesof GerrySmithis remarkable, amongst otherthings,forhisunerring senseofwhatisnecessary, ratherthanwhatmay be commercially attractive, likeyet anotherbookon one of thenineteenthcenturyclassics .Hispioneering workon PrinceMirskii andon Russianverse andversification arewellknown,butthepresentvolumein somewaysmarks a newdeparture, beinginparta translated anthology, inparta biography of Boris Slutskii(I9I9-86), a poet who, like many other Soviet writers, was in dangerof post-perestroika oblivion.Smithhasperformed a valuableservice in rescuingSlutskii's reputation fromthe fateof a vaguelyremembered and largely misunderstood Sovietwarpoet.Bypublishing manyofSlutskii's poems andmemoirswhichhaveonlycometolightin thepost-Communist era,and by usingthe poet'sarchiveto providea narrativecommentary, Smithhas REVIEWS 149 produced a fascinatingbook that rehabilitatesthis interestingand individual writerfarmore convincinglythan any politicalprocess. At approximatelythe same time as Things thatHappened waspublished,there appearedin Russia a new book, BorisSlutskii,Teper' Osventsim chasto snitsiamne (St Petersburg, I999), which contains three furtherexcerpts from the poet's war memoirs which are even more outspoken than those in Smith's compilation, stressing, amongst other things, the poet's strong sense of his Jewish identity. Important as the new materials undoubtedly are, their unavailabilityto nTings thatHappened does not diminishthe overallvalue of the present volume which depends not on sensation but on a carefullypainted overallportraitof a man and his age. Many of the poems that Smith has chosen to build his composite pictureof Slutskii'sexperiences were writtenin the 195os but only publishedfortyor so years later. One such was the verse tribute to his friend and patron Jl'ia Erenburg,which firstappearedin I99I: He didn'ttakea thawto be the spring, and fascinatedby the new, he didn't overlookthe old in it. Oh no! He didn'ttakea thaw forspring, and wasn'tscaredof scarecrows,not at all, but he knewwell how powerfulthey are (p. 2 I0). Apart from understated yet telling political statements, Slutskii's suppressed poems produce a pleasingly sceptical and dry-eyed view of the heroic events of the War, and a picture of the friendships and achievements as well as the miseries of literary life during and just after Stalin's reign, often tinged with Jewish irony and humour...

Distance Manipulation: The Russian Modernist Search for a New Drama by Joanna s> Kot (review)

REVIEWS 147 Fitz-JamesO'Brien'sblatantplagiarismof the Russianwritermay be takenas an albeitback-handedtestimonialto his literaryworth. Department ofModernLanguages ROBERT REID Keele University Kot,Joanna. Distance Manipulation: 7heRussian Modernist Search foraNewDrama. Northwestern University Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1999. v + 170 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. $54.95. THIS study takes five disparate dramatic texts which, together, are seen to constitute an experimental approach to twentieth-centurydramatic writing, and discussestheirsignificancein termsof 'distancemanipulation'.The plays are a world-acclaimed masterpiece -- The Cherry Orchard; a distinguished example of RussianSymbolistdrama Blok'sThePuppet Show; a little-known play by Sologub, T7he Triumph of Death,and two obscure works by Zinaida Gippiusand VyacheslavIvanov HolyBloodand Tantalus. The choice of plays might seem arbitrary,were it not for the fact that they are allRussianand belong roughlyto the same historicalmoment, two having been stagedfamouslyby Meierkhold.However, the selection is made to stand or fallon thesignificanceof 'distancemanipulation'which, here, hasaprotean and ubiquitous task to perform in sustaining a difficult, even chimerical, intellectual project. The term has partly formal and partly performative connotations in that it is seen to relateto qualitieswithin dramatictextswhich engage, or disengage,the intellectand emotion of someone called a 'recipient' or 'virtualrecipient' (who, for some reason, is always referredto as 'he'). It also hiassomnething to do with the ways in which plays areperformedeitherto invoke emotional engagement, or produce intellectual estrangement. On the formallevel, realistictexts are seen to conform to a hypothetical 'recipient's' expectational niormswhereas experimental texts which seek to break with realismevoke a correspondingeffectof distanciation.Each text is discussedin termsof its capacityto promote or inhibitsuch an effect. There are moments when the book succeeds in sublimating its own theoreticalpremises as in the unpretentiousand straightforwarddiscussion of ThePuppet Show.However, large sections are couched in the followingkind of hyperbole: 'In their texts a large number of distally oriented and nonperlocutionaryreferentialsegmentsare alternatedwith proximalexpressive segments. Such a distributionsubstitutesforthe drama'straditionalhighly perlocutionaryoriented discourse,while continuing to presentabstract,distal material'(p. 124). This passageis takenfrom the conclusion, which only lacks two of the book'sfavoured'buzz'words, 'deixis'and 'deictic',to be complete. Apart from massive generalizations, marked usually by a numbered note directingthe readerto:'See. . .' (followedby alitanyof names andpublication dates), cogency of argument is occasionally undermined by non-revelatory insightsof the following order: 'Alot of words are poured forth in TheCherry Orchard as in all the playwright'sworks:the charactersspeak incessantly' (p. 40). Well, after all, it is a play. The same section describes Astrov as a 148 SEER, 79, I, 2001 character in 7hreeSisters(p. 36) and anybody who did not know TheCherry Orchard could be forgiven for believing that the play concerns Ranevskaia's relations with her husband, her son and her lover, there being 'very little action in the traditional sense [... .] Ranevskaia'shusband dies of drink, her son drowns [and] her lover robs her' (p. 43). Pishchikis describedas having a 'tendency of putting himself to sleep' (p. 42) whilst the charactersare seen to be 'trappedin a kind of limbo that is not only spiritual,but often material,and even economic' (p. 35, emphases added). The author also quotes, uncritically, (in addition to supplying the wrong page reference)J. L. Styan's claim that there are no less than fifty off-stage characters in the play, including 'gardeners'.To cap it all, 7The Cherry Orchard is described as 'an example of a new genre, one that points to the absurdity of twentieth-century theatre' (p. 47) when presumablywhat is meant is Theatre of theAbsurd. In case this should seem unfair to Ms Kot, her impressive list of 'Works Cited' runsto twentypages (infact the endnotes, bibliographyand index take up fortypages nearly one third the length of the actual text) and she does give the impression of being very knowledgeable about Polish dramatists.In fact, one wonders why she did not base her study on the unknown and littleknown [to thisreviewer]names thatshecites.At itsbest, the bookis intelligent and informed;at itsworst it is both intellectuallyimmodest and expressively/ theoreticallybizarre.Bewailingthe styleof Tantalus and apparentlyforgetting that what is being describedis a play, Kot complains that, 'likethe flickering of an impressionist'spaintbrush, Ivanov [sic] dots the text with these tiny motifs [i.e. words] [...] that from a distance help create...