Waiting For Godot Research Articles

James Joyce's "Portrait": A New Reading by David Pierce

Reviewed by: James Joyce's "Portrait": A New Reading by David Pierce Greg Winston (bio) James Joyce's "Portrait": A New Reading, by David Pierce . Brighton: Edward Everett Root, 2019. xiv + 209 pp. £40.99 cloth, £19.99 paper, £15.00 ebook. The singular emphasis in the subtitle to David Pierce's volume belies its structure and rationale: in fact, James Joyce's "Portrait": A New Reading comprises many readings of Joyce's novel, including intellectual influences, literary themes, and formal devices. Overall, its chapters bear the stamp of a thoughtful teacher and delighted reader intent on sharing his well of scholarly knowledge and pedagogical experience. Pierce opens with Virginia Woolf's quotation stressing readers' self-reliance: "The only advice … that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions." 1 If such counsel would seem to undermine a critical project, here, it introduces readers to Pierce's use of touchstones to situate Joyce amidst modernist contemporaries and, more frequently, nineteenth-century predecessors, especially Ernest Renan, Oscar Wilde, and W. B. Yeats. The introduction includes "First Encounters," an honest reflection of Pierce's initial frustration with A Portrait: "What is going on I would ask myself. Out of hearing of anyone around, I would mutter Help! Is there something wrong with me that I am struggling so badly?" (3). Such early agonies presumably led to confident footholds; if the rest of New Reading is an indication, these were primarily found in late Victorian aesthetics, with additional grounding in French realism [End Page 182] and Russian formalism. A subsequent section provides an overview of A Portrait's chapters 2-5 that emphasizes ideas of narrative cohesion, history, and the making of the artist, before Pierce asserts three principal themes he sees in A Portrait : the writing process, the Icarus/Dedalus myth, and freedom. This study places history and culture second behind intellectual influence and literary technique. While Pierce might occasionally bring facts of Dublin geography or Irish history to bear on his reading, his interpretations develop mostly apart from—and to a degree push back against—the turn in recent decades towards postcolonial and historical assessments of Joyce's work. Chapter 2, "The Life and Times of James Joyce" (37-66), is not a sustained historical argument, but rather a general literary timeline of Joyce's life, one that extends, tellingly, fourteen years beyond Joyce's own death to that of his brother Stanislaus in 1955. Indeed, Pierce often approaches A Portrait via the perspective of Stanislaus's writings as well as Richard Ellmann's biography. 2 His timeline typically blends Joyce's biography with Irish and European political history, occasionally inserting a layer of opinion, as in the entry for 1953: "Beckett's En attendant Godot is given its first performance in Paris, followed in 1955 by Waiting for Godot in London. Without Joyce and Beckett, the Irish writers who found a home in Paris, modern literature would be unimaginable" (65). Chapter 3 makes the case for reading A Portrait as a literary descendant of the aesthetic movement, with a focus on Joris-Karl Huysmans's novel À rebours, symbolism, and Oscar Wilde. 3 Pierce asserts these influential threads in what reads like a thesis statement for the chapter, if not a pitch for the entire book: "The aim is to better appreciate the nineteenth-century literary contexts behind Joyce's novel. Joyce's rebelliousness is both home-grown and part of a European movement, and it [sic] worth spending time on how Joyce learned his trade from others both in Britain and in continental Europe" (70-71). Pierce foregrounds British and Continental aestheticism rather than Irish nationalism. For those accustomed to seeing the novel with a postcolonial lens, this emphasis might seem to overlook some of A Portrait's social and historical realities. At the same time, it signals an interesting, and overlooked, critical direction—one that can shine fresh light on some of the ratiocination and debate of the university scenes. Chapter 4 does bring A Portrait into juxtaposition with the Irish cultural revival through its comparison with W. B...

Tom Phillips’s illustrations for the Folio edition of Waiting for Godot

In the light of the imagery associated with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, in set designs, posters and book covers, the present article examines Tom Phillips’s illustrations for the Folio Society edition of Waiting for Godot (2000). Considering that Phillips’s images embody a particular style in form and structure, functioning as pictorial elements recalling contexts, images and relations, we propose that the artist predicates his work on the premise that readers will have had previous contact with the play either in performance or as a text.

Beckett's Waiting for Godot

Beckett's <i>Waiting for Godot</i>

Eloquent Silences in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter

This paper analyzes Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1954) and Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter (2003) by focusing on their affinities and differences. It is an analytical literary study from a linguistic standpoint using Kenny’s (2011) ideas. In addition to focusing on differences, the aim of this study is to scrutinize silence and its different meanings in as much as silence is a distinctive feature that groups and differentiates both plays. The study sheds light on a different aspect of research. Hence, besides focusing on interpreting speeches, this paper analyzes silences in both plays. It vindicates that silences are as important in literary interpretation as speeches. While Beckett’s silences indicate the void of modern life, Pinter’s silences convey threats and violence. Albeit much attention is given to verbal utterances and silences are generally neglected in terms of literary analysis, they are a sine qua non-in terms of understanding Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter and most importantly understanding the different languages of silence that greatly contribute to the whole meaning of both plays. Consequently, silences deserve much attention in literary interpretation as speeches and they are highly eloquent.

Towards a Deconstructive Text: Beyond Language and the Politics of Absences in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot

Towards a Deconstructive Text: Beyond Language and the Politics of Absences in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot

Eloquent Silences in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Harold Pinter's the Dumb Waiter

This paper analyzes Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1954) and Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter (2003) by focusing on their affinities and differences. It is an analytical literary study from a linguistic standpoint using Kenny’s (2011) ideas. In addition to focusing on differences, the aim of this study is to scrutinize silence and its different meanings in as much as silence is a distinctive feature that groups and differentiates both plays. The study sheds light on a different aspect of research. Hence, besides focusing on interpreting speeches, this paper analyzes silences in both plays. It vindicates that silences are as important in literary interpretation as speeches. While Beckett’s silences indicate the void of modern life, Pinter’s silences convey threats and violence. Albeit much attention is given to verbal utterances and silences are generally neglected in terms of literary analysis, they are a sine qua non-in terms of understanding Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter and most importantly understanding the different languages of silence that greatly contribute to the whole meaning of both plays. Consequently, silences deserve much attention in literary interpretation as speeches and they are highly eloquent.

Ballocksed, Banjaxed or Banjoed: Textual Aberrations, Ghost Texts, and the British &lt;em&gt;Godot&lt;/em&gt;

Censorship details of the London premiere, publication, and revival of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot have been much discussed in the critical discourse, but that discussion has seldom been based on the complete primary documents. As a result, erroneous and unverified information has been disseminated. In fact, the notes and correspondence in the Lord Chamberlain’s archives, proscriptions demanded by the official protectors of British decency, tell a story richer and substantially different from the received wisdom on these issues. In the case of Godot, the tussle between Beckett and his London producer, Donald Albery, on the one hand, and on the other, three of the Lord Chamberlain’s principal deputies, Sir Vincent Troubridge, Sir Norman Gwatkin, and C.D. Heriot, suggests an exchange that threatened the British production of the play. It created an atmosphere, moreover, in which English publisher Faber and Faber believed that it could offer only a sanitized version of the play in 1956.

Soliloquies: A Movement-based Approach towards Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

The research entitled “Soliloquies: a movement-based approach towards Beckett’s Waiting for Godot” examines my understanding of the play, which is manifested in the form of a dance piece along with a writing component. The conceptual foreground is drawn from the circumstantial analysis of a duality of human’s strategies confronting the difficult situation in their waits. “Waiting for Godot” (WfG), the biggest iconic of modern theatre, is the baseline to address the pragmatic understanding towards human condition and human self-reflection. The research aims to discover an alternative way bringing the abstract concept of human condition into a tacit understanding of the dance performance as well as the writing component. Both literary investigation and artistic-based research are processed simultaneously to discover the coherence, through which the creative process would find the equilibrium in both practical and academic. The observation of WfG’s dramatic tension leads the choreographic process in focusing kinesthetic exploration to represent ‘body and mind’. The idea is manifested through the dance performance entitled “Soliloquies”, which uses the presence of Balinese and Javanese elements as a starting point as well as the development of individual aesthetic experiences of the dancers. The results of the research generate distinctive movement vocabularies to convey its choreographic structure, while they also challenge an intercultural dialogue in the process of studio research. It draws the conclusion that such investigation could articulate the manifestation of movement-based approach towards Beckett’s WfG, that is the absurd of human condition. It also brings out a hermeneutic sphere in the art process, which works for me, as a female Indonesian dancer, to reconstruct identity within Indonesia contemporary state.

Restarting convergence to reinvigorate output legitimacy: is the EMU Waiting for Godot, again?

ABSTRACTRelying on the insights of the Comparative Political Economy (CPE) literature and, mostly, from the structural institutional features implied by Varieties of Capitalism, this article challenges the idea of restarting convergence to have a smoothly functioning Eurozone. In literature, Europeanization and convergence have commonly been conceived as strictly related concepts. This conception persists once the institutional way forward from the crisis – epitomized by the Five Presidents’ Report – is also considered. A close investigation of the interrelation among Europeanization, convergence and output legitimacy reveals that the emphasis on convergence overshadowed the resilience of the domestic political economies structures. A support indicator for EC/EU membership, based on Eurobarometer data, is therefore built to display the functioning of this relationship. Eventually, the institutional heterogeneity characterizing the domestic political economies is individuated to be an important determinant of the cross-country paths of divergence that became visible even before the eruption of the Euro-crisis.

The Eventfulness of Non-Events in Modernist Poetry: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Bertolt Brecht’s “Vom armen B. B.”

Abstract Although lyric poetry is not a narrative genre in the strict sense, poems do employ narrative elements extensively. Due to the temporal condition of human existence, the temporality of living, acting and communicating, the sequence of the utterance in poems follows a temporal organization, consisting of changes of state. The lyric text can thus be conceived of as the hybrid interaction of narrative and poetic structures. Genre-specifically, narrative elements in poems tend to occur in covert or condensed forms, typically in the mental sphere. Since a narrative in order to be “tellable” requires a decisive, “eventful” turn, poems, too, tend to feature some kind of event, which constitutes their central “point”: some surprising shift in their sequential structure. Although the normal case of an event is a decisive change of state, there are also interesting examples where the non-occurrence of an (expected) event counts as eventful constituting the tellability of the story. That applies not only to narratives in fiction and drama (such as Beckett’s Waiting for Godot) but also to lyric poetry. ‒ After expounding the transgeneric application of concepts of narrativity and eventfulness to lyric poetry this article analyzes in detail two eminent modernist poems as significant cases where the non-occurrence of an eventful change constitutes an event in its own right (and thereby the point of the text): T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Bertolt Brecht’s “Vom armen B. B.” (“Of poor B.B.”). The two poems are shown to differ significantly with respect to meaning and function of eventful uneventfulness: The absence of decisive changes is presented in The Waste Land as a deplorable failure of traditional values and forms of vital regeneration but in “Of poor B. B.” as a provocative rejection of conventional concepts and expectations.

‘Let's wait and see’: Twisted Affinities between Beckett and Friel

This article discusses Beckett's and Friel's interest in waiting in the context of Jacques Derrida's notions of ‘messianism’ and the ‘messianic’. Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Friel's Freedom of the City and Wonderful Tennessee associate waiting with a dislike of closure and endorse a future which evades determination and lies outside the current rigid, rational, and legitimate concepts. Yet contrary to Beckett's tramps who are unable to cope with the radical openness of the future and are confined to repetition, Friel's characters embrace a future that remains open to self difference and struggle to move beyond the inadequacy of the familiar and the feasible.

Beckett's Waiting for Godot

Beckett's <i>Waiting for Godot</i>

No Man's Land

Harold Pinter's stoic 1975 play No Man's Land, starring Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellan, was staged at London's Wyndham's Theatre between September 20 and December 17, 2016, after a short tour of the UK. The production was a revival of its Broadway run in 2013 and 2014, where it played in repertory with Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, with the two knights also in the roles of Vladimir and Estragon, and both plays directed by Sean Mathias. Toward the end of its run, the performance of December 15 was broadcast live into cinemas in the United Kingdom and Europe, and live or soon after in the United States and other territories, as part of the National Theatre Live project. NT Live began broadcasting live theater in 2009 and to date has offered local access to over forty London stage productions to over 2,000 venues around the world. While these shows cannot offer the direct intimacy and collective experience that a live performance affords, they do capture aspects of the performances, often through the availability of close-ups, that theatrical experience cannot. Stewart's and McKellen's rich and nuanced performances of Hirst and Spooner, alongside those of Owen Teale and Damien Molony as Briggs and Foster, proved worthy of this level of scrutiny, and certainly merited the worldwide exposure.Set in an Endgame-like, rotund, paneled room, with a projected skyscape of a canopy of leaves overhead, the production visually is austere and claustrophobic. The décor omits the bookcases that Pinter designates for the sparse set, focusing instead on the centrality of alcohol in the bar that figures center-stage. Properties and costume establish a respect of period, with 1970s suits, Cuban heels, CND badge, cucumber sandwiches, and best china. As such, the production is openly naturalistic, and the acting style hits this straight off the bat. In their first scene, Stewart projects a clearly disoriented Hirst, manifesting some trembling, insecure signs of dementia (Oliver Sacks had been consulted by the production). He sits and tolerates the garrulous Spooner, presented by McKellen with relish as he owns the stage with his banter. The performance generates and sustains a level of hilarity as the two men engage, quickly winning over the live and cinema audiences, though the comedy is masterfully (at first) held in restrained and measured check. Where most productions of this play might promote an audience's investment swiftly in suspecting and wishing to learn more of Spooner's motivations, Stewart's troubled Hirst, bemused and vulnerable to exploitation, draws in our concern equally.The naturalism eventually gives way occasionally to other modes, most notably in the second act where a fortified Hirst reappears and bamboozles Spooner with his “memories” of him as Charles Wetherby. Something of the Didi and Gogo music hall revue appears in this exchange, as the two attempt to out-do one another, and the camera close-ups make this all the more evident. A quick visual joke is even inserted, with McKellan undoing his jacket and letting his paunch out, only to pull his belly back in when Stewart delivers the line about Spooner/Wetherby being of athletic stature. Other lazzi, such as Spooner's foolery over offering coffee and making a coin disappear, bring in touches of clowning levity that perhaps stand out more on screen than when appreciated at a distance from the stage. Certainly, the cinema audience might occasionally laugh where the theater audience did not, or before them, being able to see detail that was more obscure in the theater (including Stewart's brief corpse when he spills coffee on himself).Teale's Briggs, built like a nightclub gangland bouncer, and Molony's Foster, a lithe, sanguine manservant, are performed with considerable range and subtlety in this production, which affords them more vulnerability than these characters usually project. Perhaps a product of an overtly naturalistic approach to character motivation and backstory, Briggs's shift from self-confident threat in act 1 to a more contained and servile presence in act 2 is particularly notable.The NT Live showing offered audiences “added value” in the form of an after-show discussion with cast and director, chaired by Samira Ahmed. Interestingly, in this discussion it transpired that this production manifested something of a genetic connection to the original 1975 debut, when Hirst and Spooner were created by Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Gielgud. A nineteen-year-old Mathias had been present at the first night, and a devoted Stewart had gone to see the play three times in one week. The latter admitted to making use of two instances from that production, including Richardson's deliberately firm clink of bottle against glass with each refill. Nonetheless, the vision of Pinter's play in this production was original, distinct, witty, tense, and, in the final moments when Teale and Molony deliberately retreat from the fading pool of light around Stewart and McKellen, appropriately sour.

Becketts's Waiting for Godot and Happy Days

Becketts's <i>Waiting for Godot</i> and <i>Happy Days</i>

Beckett's Waiting for Godot, directed by Pontus Stenshäll

Beckett's <i>Waiting for Godot</i>, directed by Pontus Stenshäll

‘모자’와 ‘장화’ 벗기 : 불교사상으로 읽는 사무엘 베케트의 『고도를 기다리며』

‘모자’와 ‘장화’ 벗기 : 불교사상으로 읽는 사무엘 베케트의 『고도를 기다리며』

Kristof Bilsen, director. Elephant’s Dream. 2014. 71 minutes. Lingala, French (with English, French, or Dutch subtitles). Democratic Republic of the Congo. Dalton Distribution. €15.00.

Kristof Bilsen, director. Elephant’s Dream. 2014. 71 minutes. Lingala, French (with English, French, or Dutch subtitles). Democratic Republic of the Congo. Dalton Distribution. €15.00. - Volume 60 Issue 1

Neurological inspiration in Beckett's Waiting for Godot

The work of the Irish writer Samuel Beckett (1906–89) was substantially influenced by his medical readings. In 1952, he wrote his masterpiece Waiting for Godot, a play associated with the Theatre of the Absurd which described the fanciful lucubrations of two marginalised men, Vladimir and Estragon, awaiting the arrival of someone (a saviour; does Godot represent God?) who will never come. While they wait, they are joined by two other marginalised men (Pozzo and Lucky) with a comparable style of dialogue.

The Story of Drama: Tragedy, Comedy and Sacrifice from the Greeks to the Present by Gary Day

Reviewed by: The Story of Drama: Tragedy, Comedy and Sacrifice from the Greeks to the Present by Gary Day Ben Phelan The Story of Drama: Tragedy, Comedy and Sacrifice from the Greeks to the Present. By Gary Day. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; pp. 248. In The Story of Drama, Gary Day says that "we cannot prove" Freud's theory of Eros and Thanatos, because "Freud's theory of the instincts may well have been supplanted by the science of genetics." Day argues, however, that it "remains an intriguing proposition" (12). This may also be the best way to approach Day's own work, which also cannot be proven, but is an "intriguing proposition." Relying heavily upon Freud, James George Frazer's The Golden Bough, and the Cambridge Ritualists (who themselves relied heavily upon Frazer, as Day reminds us), The Story of Drama finds a common thread running through Western theatre: sacrifice. Day argues that too often "thinkers on tragedy tend to stress its spiritual or philosophical aspect at the expense of its relation to ritual" (2). This is not too dissimilar from the way most theatre educators approach tragedy in the classroom, where the discussion is dominated by Aristotle's Poetics, his six aspects of drama, and a reading of Oedipus that stresses the role of fate in the life of a character and through the workings of a plot. This pedagogy-criticism is what Day would call "spiritual" or "philosophical"; rather than continue that focus, he wants to reframe Western drama as ritual, specifically as sacrifice. While sacrifice may sound "spiritual," Day does not mean it in a wholly religious sense, but instead argues that sacrifice "is best considered as a narrative, that is, something which gives shape and meaning to existence . . . [not] in a religious way, simply in a holistic one" (9). That is to say, sacrifice needs to do something—to serve some kind of need within the community. If all of this sounds too abstract, let me give of an example of how Day's argument works in practice. Much has been said about whether the Quem Quaeritis or Visitatio Sepulchri is or is not theatre. Day points to several scholars who have argued both ways. O. B. Hardison Jr., for instance, notes that "acting was alien to the medieval mind," while Katie Normington argues that "the use of costumes and stage directions indicate that it was indeed a piece of theatre" (64). Day avoids taking sides in this debate; instead, he argues that "whatever significance the Visitatio has in the history of theatre, it is also important because it echoes ancient rituals which celebrate the return of new life" (65). By sidestepping the debate about whether the trope is theatre, Day masterfully reframes the discussion to be about sacrifice—the common thread connecting Western performance traditions. This is an example of where the book is at its strongest. In helping us to rethink how we discuss theatre, Day is providing critics and educators a new set of tools with which to work. He does not limit his exploration of theatre as sacrifice to ancient and medieval theatre, however. The book covers ancient Greek through twenty-first-century drama. Each chapter contains readings of plays as case studies for how the social function of sacrifice works within a given historical moment. A strength of Day's book is that many of the plays chosen are lesser-known works; for instance, he chooses to read Oscar Wilde's A Woman of No Importance rather than The Importance of Being Earnest. Other, more well-known plays include Everyman, King Lear, Waiting for Godot, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Topdog/Underdog. The book has some problems, however. There are moments where Day makes assumptions, connections, and logical leaps that failed to convince me for lack of supporting evidence. For instance, when discussing Plautus's The Rope, he argues that "the conflict between the lovers and the older figures who oppose their union is the dramatic equivalent of the fight between winter and spring. The eventual marriage of the young couple is the socially acceptable version of ancient fertility rites" (56–57). This argument requires a leap of faith...

British radio drama and the avant-garde in the 1950s

The BBC in the 1950s was a conservative and cautious institution. British theatre was at the same time largely commercial and offered a glamourous distraction from wider social and political realities. During the decade, however, new avant-garde approaches to drama emerged, both on the stage and on radio. The avant-garde was particularly vibrant in Paris, where Samuel Beckett was beginning to challenge theatrical orthodoxies. Initially, managers and producers in BBC radio rejected a radio version of Beckett’s, Waiting for Godot and other experimental work was viewed with distaste but eventually Beckett was accepted and commissioned to write All That Fall (1957), a masterpiece of radio drama. Other Beckett broadcasts followed, including more writing for radio, extracts from his novels and radio versions of his stage plays as well as plays by the experimental radio dramatist, Giles Cooper. This article examines the different change agents which enabled an initially reluctant BBC to convert enthusiastically to the avant-garde. A networked group of younger producers, men and women, played a vital role in the acceptance of Beckett as did the striking pragmatism of senior radio managers. A willingness to accept the transnational cultural flow from Paris to London was also an important factor. The attempt to reinvent radio drama using ‘radiophonic’ sound effects (pioneered in Paris) was another factor for change and this was encouraged by growing competition from television drama on the BBC and ITV. The acceptance and eventual championing of avant-garde drama in the late 1950s reveal how the BBC’s commitment to public service broadcasting facilitated a flowering of experimental and avant-garde drama during radio drama’s golden age.