Overview
- Contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship of literature and philosophy
- Challenges the perspective that Beckett is not accessible to a non-specialist audience
- Considers the concepts of habit, intuition and loss in Beckett’s writings
Part of the book series: New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century (NIBTFC)
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About this book
Beckett’s Intuitive Spectator: Me to Play investigates how audience discomfort, instead of a side effect of a Beckett pedagogy, is a key spectatorial experience which arises from an everyman intuition of loss. With reference to selected works by Henri Bergson, Immanuel Kant and Gilles Deleuze, this book charts the processes of how an audience member’s habitual way of understanding could be frustrated by Beckett’s film, radio, stage and television plays. Michelle Chiang explores the ways in which Beckett exploited these mediums to reconstitute an audience response derived from intuition.
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Keywords
Table of contents (6 chapters)
Reviews
“Michelle Chiang’s superb book is the first serious attempt at making sense of Beckett’s work from the point of view of the spectator. Her rigorous and philosophically informed book enlists Bergson, Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, but also Brecht and Eisenstein, to demonstrate that Beckett’s work requires ‘ecstatic spectators’ capable of being ‘besides themselves,’ thus receptive facing pathos and negativity, more often than not regenerated by Beckett’s gripping aesthetics of loss.” (Jean-Michel Rabaté, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and author of Think, Pig! Beckett at the limit of the human)
“Chiang’s work is intelligent, assured, well-informed theoretically, and engages continually with the existing scholarship. By bringing together Beckett's dramatic experiments in four media, and reading them through a lens of the intuition of loss, where durée and habituated time abut each other, this study offers its audience new ways of thinking about these challenging texts.” (Mark Byron, Associate Professor of Modern Literature, University of Sydney, Australia)
“Michelle Chiang makes a compelling case for how Samuel Beckett’s drama both unsettles and intrigues the spectator. Sophisticated and accessible, the book argues that Beckett’s work in each medium of stage, radio, film and television disrupts our habitual, comfortable frames of knowledge and perception, confronting us with an intuitive sense of loss that any spectator can access. Drawing on a range of theorists and philosophers including Kant, Bergson and Deleuze, Chiang’s account is rooted in the phenomenological experience of watching Beckett’s drama in each specific medium, and offers a fascinating account of the intuitive spectator of Beckett’s work.” (Anna McMullan, Professor of Theatre, University of Reading, UK)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Michelle Chiang is Assistant Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research interest is in the intersection between literature and the Philosophy of Time and Mind.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Beckett's Intuitive Spectator
Book Subtitle: Me to Play
Authors: Michelle Chiang
Series Title: New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91518-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-91517-3Published: 25 July 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-08265-9Published: 14 December 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-91518-0Published: 16 July 2018
Series ISSN: 2945-6797
Series E-ISSN: 2945-6800
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VIII, 196
Topics: British and Irish Literature, Postmodern Literature, Contemporary Theatre