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Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and
Text
Critical
Studies in the Humanities
Steven Connor’s
Samuel Beckett, Repetition, Theory and Text, is the
first book to have presented an extended poststructuralist
reading of Beckett’s work. Drawing on the theories of
Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze to show the centrality of
repetition in Beckett’s work, Connor explored the
paradoxical forms and effects of repetition across a wide
range of Beckett’s texts, from the early fiction through to
the most recent drama. Connor considered Beckett’s
translations of his own works (both to and from French and
English) and Beckett’s practice as a director of his own
plays, and examined the way in which repetition functions
within critical discourse to create and sustain the
mythology that has grown up around Beckett’s work.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and Editions Cited
1. Difference and Repetition
2. Economies of Repetition
Murphy
Watt
3. Repetition in Time:
Proust and
Molloy
4. Centre, Line, Circumference: Repetition in the Trilogy
Malone Dies
The Unnamable
Centre, Line, Circumference: The
Novellas
5. Repetition and Self-Translation:
Mercier and Camier,
First Love, The Lost Ones
6. Presence and Repetition in Beckett’s Theatre
The Doubling of Presence:
Waiting
for Godot, Endgame
Voice and Mechanical Reproduction:
Krapp’s Last Tape, Ohio Impromptu, Rockaby,
That Time
7. What? Where? Space and the Body
What? Where?
Fundamental Sounds — Language and the
Body: Not I, Acts Without Words, Quad
8. Repetition and Power
Textual Power
Producing Power
Notes
Index
This reissue of
Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text
(unavailable since the mid-1990s) has been subjected to a
very detailed revision. The author says in a new,
provocative preface, “Writing a preface of this kind is a
frankly self-indulgent thing to be allowed to do. One does
not often have the chance of acting as one’s own
resurrectionist in this way … I find myself having planted
in the book itself a motto for this whole procedure.
‘Repetition always leaves some active residue; in coming
full circle, the book ends up in a different place from
where it had begun, leaving the desire to begin again as
strong as ever.’ …I have taken the opportunity to remedy
grogginess, pomposity, fuss and nagging where they seemed to
be intolerable or remediable. Though the book’s main
arguments have had to be left to fend for themselves, I hope
that, as a result, their exposition may now seem clearer,
more candid and more lenient.”
Author
Steven
Connor is
Professor of Modern Literature and
Theory at Birkbeck College and Academic Director of the
London Consortium
Masters and Doctoral Programme in Humanities and Cultural
Studies. He is an accomplished writer,
critic and broadcaster, and the author of books on Dickens,
Beckett, Joyce, ventriloquism, skin, flies, and other topics
in literary and cultural history.
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