Waiting For Godot Research Articles

Man's Endless Pursuit of an Elusive Destination in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Backett’s characters continue onwards the vain pursuit of destination because they have no alternative but to go on. This is the way of life that no one can cure the pains of life, so they must be endured. Man is struggling with the jest of humanity and is constantly trying to make sense of his own existence as a human being. Estragon addresses Vladimir, “we always find something, eh, Didi, to give us the impression that we exist?”(Beckett,60) It seems as if human being cannot be beyond this mere impression of existence. It is the winding wheel of time that induces uncontrollable restlessness and anguish in the characters, such that they, without inhibition go on moving directionless and tread the dissolving line between remembering and forgetting, between past and present, between happiness and sorrow. Shorn of vitality, they are constantly haunted by the past and its, present manifestations in the form of reminiscences regrets and yearnings.

Gare St. Lazare Ireland's Waiting for Godot, directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett

Gare St. Lazare Ireland's <i>Waiting for Godot</i>, directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett

An Investigation of Inaction in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot: A Literary Darwinian Perspective

An Investigation of Inaction in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot: A Literary Darwinian Perspective

‘Waiting for chronic’: Time, cannabis and counterculture in Hawai‘i

What does it mean not to wait? It is possible to live in ways which do not entail waiting? Through close examination of time and its articulations among a group of US 1960s-generation ‘hippies’ and younger ‘drop outs’ in a rural backwater of Hawai‘i, I argue in this paper that it is possible to live without waiting. Drawing on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) and Baba Ram Dass’ countercultural invocation to ‘remember, be here now’, I explore unexpected interruptions to anticipated temporal flows. Structured around three vignettes on failing to hitchhike, learning to do ethnographic fieldwork through stopping trying to do ethnographic fieldwork and an unexpected interruption in the supermarket, this paper builds up a picture of non-waiting in action. Located against a backdrop of waiting as temporal interruption and affective mode, I argue that this group sought to collectively disrupt the affective modes of indifference and/or frustration they grew up with in urban mainland America. Through new forms of affective engagement they became able to collectively reframe temporal interruption as existing within rather than without local temporal flows, interruptions ceased to be ruptures to temporal textures but part of their very fabric. Located within temporal flows, they did not force individuals out of a moral community of (time is money) efficient, productive citizens but reframed productivity itself in terms of producing sociality, positive affective experience and communitas. Out of a multitude of moments of not waiting, a temporal texture of American counterculture emerges.

Trying to Understand Waiting for Godot: An Adornian Analysis of Beckett’s Signature Work

Adorno had such an affinity for Beckett that he dedicated his posthumously published work, Aesthetic Theory, to him. In 1961, he wrote a thoughtful—if dizzyingly complex—tribute to Beckett’s play, Endgame, a work that models many aspects of Adorno’s cultural criticism. My aim, accordingly, is to offer an Adornian reading of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot by drawing upon his critiques of music, aesthetics, and the culture industry. My goal is twofold: to offer a refreshing analysis of one of the most significant dramatic achievements of the twentieth century, and, in doing so, to demonstrate Adorno’s relevance to contemporary cultural studies by deploying multiple elements of his oeuvre.

I am going to explain the title and, with it, my intention of clinging, somehow, to an already-known sensation: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, as an initial invitation to a challenging, unspecific knowledge, to an incursion to oneself, to the self, a

I am going to explain the title and, with it, my intention of clinging, somehow, to an already-known sensation: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , as an initial invitation to a challenging, unspecific knowledge, to an incursion to oneself, to the self , a kind of strolling with no purpose, no prejudice, a seducing to a permissive dreaming, even to a tempting aspiration to the fantastic.

Reading of Waiting, Time and Social Change in S. N. A. Agoro’s Something To Die For

The study of waiting and time, hope and none fulfilment of hope, came into literary limelight in literature particularly in the dramas of Samuel Beckett, the absurdist playwright and others like Albert Camus, Martin Esslin and Eugene Ionesco. The subject is most prominent in Samuel Beckett’s seminal dramas - Waiting for Godot (1956) and End Game (1957). In these dramas waiting is presented as a static experience that generates the rise and fall of hope. It breeds frustration, alienation, faithlessness and depersonalization. The act of waiting as a critical feature of the human condition is the most significant and intense thematic engagement in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The study notes that aside the circle of the absurd art in drama, the subject of waiting and time has not been given adequate dramatic representation by dramatists outside the absurd background. It is against this backdrop that we attempt to explore the depiction and treatment of waiting, time and social change in the dramatic universe of existentialism created by some playwrights who have not been given scholarly attention. The study shall therefore undertake a dialectical consideration of the concept of waiting and time in Agoro’s Something to die Foran existential drama and raise new judgment in the appreciation of waiting and time from the perception of Christian reflection in literary limelight and scholarship.Keywords: dialectics, waiting and time, social change, absurdism, existentialism

I am going to explain the title and, with it, my intention of clinging, somehow, to an already-known sensation: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, as an initial invitation to a challenging, unspecific knowledge, to an incursion to oneself, to the self, a

I am going to explain the title and, with it, my intention of clinging, somehow, to an already-known sensation: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, as an initial invitation to a challenging, unspecific knowledge, to an incursion to oneself, to the self, a

The Future of Europe

A well-connected public intellectual who took up the cause of ending the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s, Susan Sontag helped to assemble an international community advocating North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervention. The attention that she generated during her staging of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot turned her into the promotional face for what became a cause célèbre, and she continued to participate in many projects for Bosnia-Herzegovina after the play. In her publications, Sontag championed Sarajevo as an exceptionally European cause because of its liberal multicultural pluralism, in contradistinction to the rural, religious and militant periphery. Recovering a biographical narrative of Sontag's Sarajevo work means also turning to less official sources than the published ones, however. The Susan Sontag Papers archived at UCLA provide a less resolved record of her activity in Sarajevo. Whereas Sontag's public statements on Sarajevo represent it in broad strokes as a model ‘European’ city threatened by anti-European elements, the traces of the Sarajevo Theatre and Film Festival preserved in her personal archive better speak to the multi-layered dilemmas of cultural politics that shaped Sarajevo's cultural sphere, during the war and today. Sontag's position is rendered at times excessive and at other times contradictory when juxtaposed with these elements.

En attendant Bojangles

World Literature in Review country, Aziz predicted “that the working class will start a revolution” in Temptation of Absolute Power, which was serendipitously released a day before the 25 January Revolution. Aziz distanced herself from the initial euphoria of the Arab Spring, foreseeing the bleak realities underlining the edifice of social solidarity. In The Queue, citizens must line up at the Gate in order to receive bureaucratic permission for almost all daily activities. However, as the queue swells with people from all walks of life, the Gate refuses to open. In the heat of the Middle Eastern sun, a microcosm of this unknown city’s population begins to surface: there’s the galabeya-wearing religious fanatic; the motherly Um Mabrouk who provides refreshments and sometimes phone calls for those in the queue; the brother of a security officer killed in the clashes; and then there’s Yehya—a young protester whose participation in the Disgraceful Events has left him with a bullet wedged in his abdomen. Dr. Tarek Fahmy perhaps occupies the most precarious position of them all. The Gate’s rigid procedures tie his hands and obstruct him from operating on Yehya’s mortal injury. Each of the novel’s seven sections begins with notes from his medical record, documenting his declining health and a diminishing chance of assistance from the Gate. Tarek is aware of how close the bullet is to Yehya’s organs, yet the fear of breaking the law compromises his ethical duty. As such, he finds himself unwittingly co-opted in the Gate’s overarching system of oppression. Fusing the satirical and fantastical, Aziz reasserts the agency of individuals at a time of potent authoritarianism by confronting the state as a panoptical entity and exploring the psychological effects of the omnipotence of the Gate’s gaze. Unlike classical dystopian literature, the novel is firmly located in a specific spatial and temporal setting. For some non-Egyptians , time may appear interchangeable and it could be anywhere in the Middle East; but realistically, the physical and cultural landscape is distinctly Cairo-esque. Furthermore, the cover’s Eye of Horus set against an opaque background of Egyptian falaheen undermines the novel’s anonymous setting. The clichéd literary tropes of the dystopia canon work against Aziz’s narrative, forging a story that is all but too familiar. The narrative’s linear structure lacks the abstract ambiguity and thematic complexity that is distinguishingly Kafkaesque. Its inability to probe beyond the superficial and delve into the interiority of its characters makes the novel little more than a well-written piece of fictive social critique. Sherif Dhaimish London Olivier Bourdeaut. En attendant Bojangles. Le Bouscat, France. Finitude. 2016. 158 pages. In this short novel, an unconventional and, apparently, blissfully happy couple, as seen through the eyes of their son, dance their way through life, mostly to the tune of “Mr. Bojangles,” sung by Nina Simone. Unsurprisingly , their carefree dancing, work-free lifestyle, and general obliviousness to the outside world are eventually interrupted by dismal reality. Aside from an irate tax collector whose comminatory letters have long remained unheeded, there is, more troublingly, the mother’s slow descent into mental illness , which leads to her suicide, followed by the father’s disappearance. As told by Olivier Bourdeaut’s narrator, the young son who retrospectively describes his parents ’ whirlwind existence, what could have been a sententious morality tale (as in La Fontaine’s fable) of doomed grasshoppers, making merry and perilously living on borrowed time in a world of industrious and unforgiving ants, instead becomes a lighthearted ode to the age-old injunction of carpe diem. With its irreverent reference to Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot (1952), the novel’s title is a call to be mindful of the futility of endlessly waiting for fun, love, or fulfillment. The main characters wait only for the next song to begin as they float through the enchanted ballroom they have made of their spacious apartment. As for the narrator’s reminiscences, they are recounted in a tone of bemused wonderment , of nostalgic longing for a lost paradise. Contrary to expectations, there is no high-minded lament over a wasted childhood due to dysfunctional parents...

Bigger, Brighter, Louder: 150 Years of Chicago Theater As Seen by “Chicago Tribune” Critics by Chris Jones

Reviewed by: Bigger, Brighter, Louder: 150 Years of Chicago Theater As Seen by “Chicago Tribune” Critics by Chris Jones Stuart J. Hecht Bigger, Brighter, Louder: 150 Years of Chicago Theater As Seen by “Chicago Tribune” Critics. By Chris Jones. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 357 pp. + 16 illustrations. $27.50 cloth. Chris Jones’s anthology may not be scholarly, but it is valuable to theatre scholars. The lead theatre reviewer for the Chicago Tribune, Jones was able to plumb that newspaper’s archives in search of landmark reviews from the paper’s mid-nineteenth-century beginnings to the present, from which he selected one hundred and one, most not seen since their original publication. Jones’s collection includes reviews of both homegrown and touring productions, representative reviews from several generations of Tribune critics, and long-forgotten accounts of performances by prominent theatre artists and even some celebrities better known for their film and television work. (Imagine seeing Waiting for Godot with Harvey Korman as Didi and Mike Nichols as Lucky!) Jones includes vivid accounts of key events, most notably the 1904 Iroquois Theatre fire. Unlike many historical accounts of theatre in given cities, here the reader sits right beside the critic, experiencing memorable moments up close. Jones’s book serves as a nice companion to Richard Christiansen’s A Theater of Our Own: A History and a Memoir of 1,001 Nights in Chicago, much as a baseball color commentator complements the ongoing spiel of a play-by-play announcer: Jones’s book is like the former, providing contextualizing anecdotes that enliven and heighten the stakes of Christiansen’s narrative. Combined, the two books trumpet the theatrical highs and lows of the proverbial “Second City.” Chicago has long been a generator of noteworthy theatre, sending its artists and productions off to the East Coast hub for national consumption and cultural [End Page 343] validation. For example, Chicago Little Theatre artists Susan Glaspell and husband Jig Cook subsequently migrated east to help found the Provincetown Players. Similarly, Chicago newspaperman Ben Hecht relocated to New York City to extend his playwriting, and later screenwriting, career. Chicago nurtured Tennessee Williams, invented Second City improvisation, generated the satire Chicago and the musical Grease, and still later birthed the imaginings of director Robert Falls and the acting ensemble Steppenwolf. In the last three decades, no fewer than five of Chicago’s roughly three hundred theatres have won a Tony Award as best regional theatre. Despite its prominence, relatively little has been written about Chicago’s profound theatrical contributions. Beyond Richard Christiansen’s aforementioned history, Harvey Young and Queen Meccasia Zabriskie coauthored Black Theater is Black Life: An Oral History of Chicago Theater and Dance, a collection of interviews with some of the city’s most notable modern black theatre and dance artists. The story of Second City’s improvisational comedy has been well documented by Jeffrey Sweet and Janet Coleman. But Bigger, Brighter, Louder still fills an important historical niche. Jones organizes his reviews chronologically, bringing to light a progression of memorable events in Chicago theatre history. It opens with an 1853 notice of a show at Mr. Rice’s theatre and follows that with an 1868 review of Joseph Jefferson III as Rip Van Winkle—though still fledgling, nineteenth-century Chicago was a destination for touring stars. Subsequent reviews then chart major Chicago theatrical activity up to the 2012 Robert Falls production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, restaged in the spring of 2015 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Intriguing nuggets are found along the way: the 1890 Chicago debut of A Doll’s House; the original (Chicago-generated) production of The Wizard of Oz, from 1902; pans of both Tobacco Road and Waiting for Lefty; first looks at The Glass Menagerie, All My Sons, Waiting for Godot and Long Day's Journey into Night; debuts of American Buffalo and Working, The Grapes of Wrath and Gem of the Ocean, Clybourne Park and many more. Here is indeed a firsthand account of American theatre as seen through Midwest journalistic eyes. Jones’s book also accounts for several generations of noteworthy reviewers. Percy Hammond started off at the Tribune before heading...

Happy Years

After attending the premiere of En attendant Godot at the Théâtre de Babylone in January 1953, there was no doubt in Elmar Tophoven’s mind that this was a play he must translate and without delay. Willing to risk translating Beckett’s tragicomedy without first obtaining the rights, he deposited the completed German Godot on Jérôme Lindon’s desk three weeks later.

A Committee Room. A Table. Evening: Using Beckett's Waiting for Godot to Read Joyce's "Ivy Day in the Committee Room"

A Committee Room. A Table. Evening: Using Beckett's Waiting for Godot to Read Joyce's "Ivy Day in the Committee Room"

‘“COFO Is Not Godot’ The Free Southern Theater, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Search for a Usable Aesthetic”

‘This thing between audience and performer – it’s not one way’. – John O’Neal, 19651On 28 November 1964, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer attended a production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in Rulevil...

Acts of Perception: Samuel Becket, Time, Space and the Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland, 1922–1949

Situated in the wake of the first and second waves of the Digital Humanities, the Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland, 1922–1949 website provides interactive mapping and timeline features for academics and members of the public who are interested in the intersection of Irish literary culture, history, and environment. The site hosts Google Earth software produced interfaces with the EXHIBIT Timeline functions made available by the Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments (SIMILE) project, developed and hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Library. This paper's case study maps the biographical lifepath of the writer Samuel Beckett using digital humanities techniques such as ergodicity, and deformance. The geo-digital-timeline mapping of his biography allows us to visualize the shift in Beckett's literary perspective from a latent Cartesian verisimilitude to more phenomenological and fragmented, existential impressions of time and place. The atlas's visualizations of his Wanderjahre years in various European metropoles chart the intellectual and aesthetic influences shaping the Beckettian literary landscapes of his later and better-known works, such as En Attendant Godot (1953). Beckett's thought, works, and shifts in perception provide insight into how digital cultural mapping practices and third wave digital humanities methodologies and tools can be conceptualized and operationalized.

Samuel Beckett and Waiting for Godot

This essay focuses on the criticism of Samuel Beckett and how anti-plot is effectively expressed in the absurdist and existentialist vision that life is inherently without meaning or purpose in Waiting for Godot .

Time and Narrative in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame

The account of narrative temporality has a propensity to give impetus towards an absurd c o m p l e x i t y. C o s m o l o g i c a l a n d phenomenological collision of time gives rise to this absurdity. Philosophical tradition views the cosmological time as a succession of ‘ n o w s . ’ O n t h e o t h e r h a n d , phenomenological time is seen as an embedded structure. The concept of time as succession is rendered inoperable by the knowledge of time as co-existence. This paper intends to examine time and narration in Samuel Beckett’s plays Waiting for Godot and Endgame which always play a vital role in the turns and twists of the plot structure, characterization, environment, stage, and, above all, on the audience. The treatment and treatise of time from an ontological and epistemological viewpoint, which is seen through the scope of Narrative Theory, will certainly add more insight to the subject, and hence will explore beyond the mere philosophical/metaphysical boundaries of ‘time’ to the more practical aspects of it in Beckett’s plays.

Being borderless bodies: On the use of Beckett in a multicultural Italian public school

Abstract Scenes from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot were employed to teach Italian to migrant children in a public primary school. The drama workshop helped to develop a collaborative group of students by encouraging friendship and cooperative learning. Drama education in multilingual schools can offer solutions to many educational challenges, improving communicative and relational competences. Drama is a tool for building functional vocabulary and creating the imaginary, but quite real, common space needed to establish a solid mutual understanding among students from many different cultures, where they are free to share their cultural similarities and differences. Drama can become the place for peacefully enacting the internal conflicts that arise in the building of a new, multicultural identity. From my students, I learned that a new common language could become a way of weaving intelligent relations between different cultures. Vladimir: How’s the carrot? Estragon: It’s a carrot. Vladimir: So much the better, so much the better. – Samuel Beckett

The Narratolgy in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Yeats’s The Cat and the Moon (for the late Professor Daniel Albright)

W. B. Yeats and Samuel Beckett are Modernist dramatists, different from earlier playwrights. This paper intends to demonstrate their unique use of narratology in Yeats’s The Cat and the Moon and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. They do not make use of conventional use of foreshadowing, cause and effect sequence, or problem, climax, and resolution structure often found in a complex plot. For these playwrights the reality of the world is not shown through a fastidious depiction (narration) of the world around them but through an introspective view of the inner self: two characters are put together, instead of one with a long monologue. It is the two dramatists’ strategy to make their play dramatic; yet, although the chats between each pair appear to be random and unrelated to any of the events that follow, what they talk about reveals the reality not seen through the faculties of our eyes. This is how Yeats and Beckett depict (narrate) the actual world we live in.

Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food

Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food