Papers by Stanley Gontarski
Beyond the Shadow: Acts of Unceasing Creation
Creative Involution, 2015
This chapter discusses intuition as the method in Henri Bergson's overall philosophical proje... more This chapter discusses intuition as the method in Henri Bergson's overall philosophical project, a rethinking of metaphysics in terms of duration — that is, time as opposed to space. ‘Intuition is neither a feeling, an inspiration, nor a disorderly sympathy, but a fully developed method’, notes Gilles Deleuze, ‘one of the most fully developed methods in philosophy. It has strict rules, constituting that which Bergson calls “precision” in philosophy’, and the method already assumes, and perhaps subsumes, duration. If duration is accessible at all, it is so through what Bergson — whom Samuel Beckett called to his Trinity students ‘a philosophical visionary’ — discovers as his discourse on method, intuition, which he opposed to the scientific, quotidian functioning of mind.
Against the stereotypes of professional education
Włodzimierz Staniewski and the Phenomenon of “Gardzienice”, 2021
Tennessee Williams, T-shirt Modernism and the Refashionings of Theater
Becoming Degree Zero: Authors Vanishing into the Zone of Imperceptibility
Creative Involution, 2015
This concluding chapter looks at American writer William Burroughs. In many respects, William Bur... more This concluding chapter looks at American writer William Burroughs. In many respects, William Burroughs was an apostle of invisibility, assiduously pursuing versions of physical vanishing and advocating, above all, authorial disappearance. He has on occasion declared himself simply an ethereal medium through which his texts pass into the visible world. Samuel Beckett's initial rejection on first meeting Burroughs in 1959 was not solely or particularly to the aleatory nature of the process but to the fact that the cut up method of Burroughs involved using the writing of other authors. Burroughs's reply to such charges generally suggested what one might call today intertextuality — that all writing was cut up or collage in one way or another and that his was different from those only by degree.
Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 2020
American outlier writer William S. Burroughs was a creative force – an homme de lettres in his ow... more American outlier writer William S. Burroughs was a creative force – an homme de lettres in his own right, yes, but as a cultural theorist as well, particularly his anticipation of what we now regularly call ‘a society of control’ or ‘a surveillance culture’, and, moreover, as a textual embodiment as well. That is, Burroughs was as much a media theorist and performance artist as he was a traditional literary figure, what we generally call a writer, or novelist, although he lauded those latter categories. Through such multimodality he offered critiques of a ‘control society’ and of ‘thought control’ by a media that strips us of volition. In his lectures on Michel Foucault delivered at the Université de Paris VIII in the 1980s, Gilles Deleuze detailed Burroughs's influence on both philosophers with his critique of our ‘control societies’, a term they adopted from him.These critiques of what Burroughs calls ‘thought control’ were and currently remain inseparable from his emergence a...
Viva, Sam Beckett, or Flogging the Avant-Garde
Journal of Beckett Studies, 2006
An Art of Incompletion: A Preface
Journal of Beckett Studies, 2004
“Beckett Directs Beckett”: Endgame
Journal of Beckett Studies, 1993
STYLE AND THE MAN: Samuel Beckett and the Art of Pastiche
Having come of age as a writer amid the stylistic excesses of Modernism, Beckett found himself fo... more Having come of age as a writer amid the stylistic excesses of Modernism, Beckett found himself for a time lured to the prison-house of style. Despite his struggles to free himself from it, much of his writing is intimately, even inextricably, tied to his reading; that conclusion is one of the seminal developments of recent Beckett criticism and may define
Still at Issue after All These Years: The Beckettian Text, Printed and Performed
Journal of Beckett Studies, 2015
Since Samuel Beckett lamented to his official biographer, James Knowlson, that his ‘texts are in ... more Since Samuel Beckett lamented to his official biographer, James Knowlson, that his ‘texts are in a terrible mess’, much attention has been paid to the issues of textual accuracy and fidelity, much written about textual variance in the Beckett canon, and many attempts made and considerable money spent to remedy such variation and publishing inconsistencies, many the result of simultaneous but separate publishing processes and leavened by publishers’ eagerness to publish Beckett's new work, especially for the theatre, even as he was still developing the piece in rehearsals. Add to such creative issues something of a general slovenliness, inattention, oversights, and blunders by everyone involved in the process of publication, and we have the current state of the Beckett texts, still apparently ‘a terrible mess’. For those of us involved with such issues these past 40 (or so) years, an unacceptable level of textual variance persists even as concurrent and persistent calls for an ad...
An Interview with Michael McClure
University Press of Mississippi eBooks, Jun 20, 2024
ABEI Journal
American novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder’s lifelong attraction to and passion for if not ... more American novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder’s lifelong attraction to and passion for if not obsession with the work of James Joyce has led to unintended consequences. Wilder was writing what would become his second Pulitzer Prize winning play, The Skin of Our Teeth, while in the midst of “unriddling” Joyce’s final novel, Finnegans Wake. Accusations of plagiarism would subsequently arise from two major Joyce scholars, Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson as they raised questions about the tipping point in creative practice, the point at which common practices of textual influence and reference cross the line into excessive borrowings and plagiarism. Such accusations, which Wilder failed to acknowledge and to fully address in a timely fashion, have lingered to his discredit and have obscured his achievements both as a playwright and a major scholar of experimental literature with a particular emphasis on James Joyce. The essay details the need to return to and to reassess th...
Samuel Beckett and the ‘Idea’ of Theatre
The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, 2015
Beckett after Beckett
Choice Reviews Online, 2006
These essays by major international critics and philosophers examine Beckett's reputation &qu... more These essays by major international critics and philosophers examine Beckett's reputation "after Beckett," the years of scholarship and performance since his death in 1989. Focusing on the afterimage that lingers as a memory - a persistent, evocative, hovering, but not fully present impression that haunted Beckett and his work - the contributors simultaneously critique how Beckett's work haunts history. The volume includes a previously unpublished letter by Beckett, both in the original French and English translation, that anticipates the aesthetic discussions published as "Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit". Along with his celebrated study, Proust, it details Beckett's early artistic credo. The book also features an essay by noted philosopher Luce Irigaray that will have wide appeal beyond Beckettians and postmodernists. These essays will be important to a broad range of scholars interested in philosophical and psychological aspects, as well as practical applications of Beckett's work, particularly in the theater.
The Yearbook of English Studies, 1987
come a saint. Salavin buys a new journal, which he begins with great anticipation: On with the ne... more come a saint. Salavin buys a new journal, which he begins with great anticipation: On with the new life! Would that I were older by one year, to be able to re-read this journal and weep with joy! I am ready. I'm waiting. I'm off to meet myself. January 8-Nothing to report. January 9-Nothing to report. January 10-Nothing. January 11-Nothing that has to do with the situation in any way. January 12-Nothing. January 13-Nothing. It's snowing, but that's of no importance. (To be struck out if I copy this journal.) January 14-Nothing. 5
South Atlantic Review, 1995
Beckett's 'Happy Days': A Manuscript Study
The Modern Language Review, 1980
Second editionItem embargoed for five year
<i>Roger Blin and Twentieth Century Playwrights</i> by Odette Aslan (review)
Modern Drama, 1989
Readers will be unable to decide whether the author favors the naturalism of David Storey's T... more Readers will be unable to decide whether the author favors the naturalism of David Storey's The Changing Room, the highly metaphorical and intellectually challenging Jumpers of Tom Stoppard. Beckett 's static and monologue-filled Footfalls, or Edward Bond's history plays . Cave's innate fairness includes receptivity not only to various kinds of plays, but to various social strata. He understands the lower-middle class milieu of Trevor Griffiths' The Party as well as he understands the upper-class inteIligenstia of Griffiths' Sam Sam. Also, the author's appreciation and tolerance extend themselves to actors. In densely-constructed paragraphs Cave discusses actors' performances during the fifteen years of his survey. but he also compares those perfonnances with past performances of Gielgud, Richardson, Whitelaw, and others. Cave is obviously in love with the actors' art; his comments on John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier are brilliant summaries. Cave's own critical and moral values are implicit. In analyzing Storey's Home, for example (set in a mental asylum), Cave recognizes to the full Storey's attempt to convey the sense of genuine communication and communion the two principal characters achieve against tremendous odds. The same is true of virtually all the plays the author treats: Trevor Griffiths' Occupations, where Cave perfectly understands the carefullydisguised moral bankruptcy of the principal character, and the playwright's condemnation of that bankruptcy; Bond's The Woman (a play about Hecuba's defeat and subsequent victory through courage), where Cave shows his appreciation of the real meaning of tragedy and of the true origins of comedy. One fault of organization of New British Drama lies in the individual chapter headings. They are usually misleading. In Chapter Two ("New Forms of Comedy: Ayckboum and Stoppard"), Cave discusses Joe Orton, Alan Bennett, Peter Nichols and Michael Frayn, and then, after ten pages of concentrated prose, begins his discussion of Alan Acykboum! The same thing occurs in the third chapter. And even though Cave analyzes many plays in this book, his bibliography contains only thirty items. These seem small objections. Essentially Cave's book is a reference work full of valuable insights and his critical approach is admirable.
Reinventing Beckett
Modern Drama, 2006
Samuel Beckett's creative life (and personal life, for that matter) was marked by a series of... more Samuel Beckett's creative life (and personal life, for that matter) was marked by a series of transformations and reinventions. In the process of remaking himself, over and again, from donnish academic to avant-garde poet, from Joycean acolyte to post-Joycean minimalist, from humanist to post-humanist, perhaps, most certainly from poet to novelist to playwright to theatre director, Beckett was simultaneously reinventing every literary genre he turned his attention to. In the midst of remaking narrative in the wake of World War II, for example, he began simultaneously the reinvention of theatre, writing the ground-breaking (but still unproduced) Eleutheria between Molloy and Malone meurt [Malone Dies] and En attendant Godot [Waiting for Godot] between Malone meurt and L'Innommable [The Unnamable]. Almost as soon as he began to experience some recognition, most notably in the theatre, however, he began to recoil from it as well, as if it represented a threat, the desired atten...
Uploads
Papers by Stanley Gontarski