Factbites
 Where results make sense
About us   |   Why use us?   |   Reviews   |   PR   |   Contact us  

Topic: Samuel Beckett


Related Topics

In the News (Tue 10 Nov 09)

  
  Samuel Beckett - MSN Encarta
Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 22 December 1989) was an Irish writer, dramatist and poet.
Beckett went through a period of family conflict and self-doubt, especially after his father’s death in June 1933, which further strained Beckett’s difficult relationship with his mother.
At his death, Beckett was hailed as the most innovative and influential dramatist of the 20th century for his unconventional approach to language and plot and his uncompromising, often shocking dramatizations of human relationships.
encarta.msn.com /encyclopedia_761570941/Beckett_Samuel.html   (995 words)

  
 Samuel Beckett Encyclopedia Article @ FolkArtMuseum.com   (Site not responding. Last check: )
Beckett's work is stark, fundamentally minimalist, and deeply pessimistic about the human condition, although the pessimism is mitigated by a great and often wicked sense of humour.
The Beckett family (originally Becquet) were rumoured to be of Huguenot stock and had moved to Ireland from France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.
Beckett finished Murphy and in 1936 departed for extensive travel around Germany, during which time he filled several notebooks with lists of noteworthy artwork that he had seen, and also noted his distaste for the Nazi savagery which was then overtaking the country.
www.folkartmuseum.com /encyclopedia/Samuel_Beckett   (2951 words)

  
 Beckett's Prose Fiction
Beckett has called "writing style" "that vanity," "a bowtie about a throat cancer." The Unnamable illustrates this dangerously delusive nature of language in his funny, desperate and perplexed frontal assault on what the French philosopher and critic Gaston Bachelard called a "logosphere," a verbal fabric out of which he too is constructed as a subject.
Beckett talks in the text of his use of "little blurts midget grammar." By omitting so many of the normal elements of a conventional sentence he is able to undercut some of the denotative aspects of language while foregrounding its connotative and figurative uses.
Beckett wrote back in 1937, "As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute." It is as if he was inspired to take up this assault on the false security that language offers us with renewed energy in his old age.
www.csulb.edu /~bhfinney/beckett.html   (8169 words)

  
 Samuel Beckett Info - Encyclopedia WikiWhat.com
Although Samuel Beckett rarely spoke about his war time activities, during the two years he stayed in Roussillon, he helped the Maquis sabotage the German army in the Vaucluse mountains.
Beckett is thus considered one of the great French playwrights of the twentieth century, along with Ionesco.
Beckett's theatre is stark, fundamentally minimalist, and deeply pessimistic about human nature and the human situation.
www.wikiwhat.com /encyclopedia/s/sa/samuel_beckett.html   (657 words)

  
 Literary Encyclopedia: Samuel Beckett   (Site not responding. Last check: )
Samuel Beckett’s work has extended the possibilities of drama and fiction in unprecedented ways, bringing to the theatre and the novel an acute awareness of the absurdity of human existence – our desperate search for meaning, our individual isolation, and the gulf between our desires and the language in which they find expression.
The rest of Beckett’s life, apart from intermittent trips in Europe and the USA to direct his plays (and regular Christmas breaks in Tangier) was spent in Paris, where he and Suzanne had a flat, and in a small house in Ussy-sur-Marne—built by Beckett himself—in which he secluded himself for writing.
Beckett was motivated to protest against the prescriptive and limiting nature of “realist” conventions both in art and in human behaviour, relationships and political life.
www.literaryencyclopedia.com /php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5161   (1688 words)

  
 Samuel Beckett Biography and List of Works - Samuel Beckett Books
Beckett's work is stark, fundamentally minimalist, and deeply pessimistic about human nature and the human condition, although the pessimism is mitigated by a great and often wicked sense of humor.
Beckett finished Murphy and in 1936 departed for extensive travel around Germany, during which time he filled several notebooks with lists of noteworthy artwork that he had seen, and also noted his distaste for the Nazi savagery which was then overtaking the country.
Beckett is most renowned for the play Waiting for Godot, which was famously described by the critic Vivian Mercier as 'a play in which nothing happens, twice'.
www.biblio.com /authors/671/Samuel_Beckett_Biography.html   (2769 words)

  
 Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin into a prosperous Protestant family.
Beckett worked as country laborer and wrote WATT, his second novel, which was published in 1953 and was the last of his novels written originally in English.
Beckett was obsessed by a desire to create what he called "a literature of the unword." He waged a lifelong war on words, trying to yield the silence that underlines them.
www.kirjasto.sci.fi /beckett.htm   (1656 words)

  
 Beckett: Still Stirring - The New York Review of Books
But while Beckett was granted his quietus in 1989, there is no closure for his readers and critics, nor would we want it; for if a death wish was central to his writing, no prose was ever livelier.
In his notes Bowles recounts a conversation in which Beckett insisted that in order to represent the meaninglessness of the world it was necessary to allow chaos into the text and break down form, to declare the maker of the work as "blindly immersed" in "chance" rather than standing outside it.
Beckett was aware of course of the contradiction in his position, that it is inconsistent if not masochistic to talk, as he does to Anne Atik, of writing being a "sin against speechlessness," and then to go on writing, perverse to apply such meticulous control in texts that seek to demonstrate the impossibility of control.
www.nybooks.com /articles/19135   (3970 words)

  
 Cult of impersonality - The Boston Globe
Beckett, who died in 1989, lived to see the full flowering of his fame, and the retiring Irishman was forced into a spotlight he had no desire to stand in.
Beckett left Paris for London in 1933, underwent a long and strange psychoanalysis, and in shorter and longer fictions such as ``Murphy" (1935) sought to free himself from Joyce's exuberant influence and to find his own voice.
That cell was soon infiltrated, and Beckett, lucky to escape with his life, fled Paris for the Atlantic coast with the woman who was to become his wife.
www.boston.com /news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/07/02/cult_of_impersonality/?page=full   (1340 words)

  
 Famous Irish Lives - Samuel Beckett
The Becketts were of French Huguenot descent and, after a distinguished career at Trinity College, Dublin, he was to spend much of his life in France.
Beckett was in Dublin at the outbreak of World War II, but 'preferred France at war to Ireland at peace'.
Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, but shunned the presentation ceremony.
www.irelandseye.com /aarticles/history/people/whoswho/beckett.shtm   (358 words)

  
 Beckett - Biography
Samuel Barclay Beckett was born -- depending on who you ask, for Beckett's claims on this issue differ from those of legal documents -- on April 13, 1906 in Foxrock, south of Dublin.
Beckett became, in his own words, "the proud possessor of a pleural barometer," and his inner organs became even more sensitive to the climate of the outside world.
Beckett's assailant, improbably named Prudent, met his victim during his criminal trial and said in polite French that he did not know why he had done it, and that he was sorry.
www.themodernword.com /beckett/beckett_biography.html   (1722 words)

  
 universiteit antwerpen - The Samuel Beckett Society - Biography
Samuel Barclay Beckett was born without difficulty at Cooldrinach in Foxrock, County Dublin, on 13 April 1906, but grew old enough to fill the air with many different cries.
Beckett was restless in his teaching posts, and his reluctance to settle down in a respectable career worried his family, especially his mother from whom he became estranged for several years.
Walking home late one night with some friends, Beckett was nearly killed when he was stabbed by a "pimp." In hospital, Joyce looked after his young friend, paying his expenses and bringing around numerous visitors.
www.ua.ac.be /main.aspx?c=*SBECKETT&n=22082   (1177 words)

  
 Biography of Samuel Beckett - Dramatist
Here Beckett explores the paradox of the self that can never know itself; in the very act of observing itself the self splits in two, an observing consciousness and an object that is being observed.
Beckett's other prose works also view in various ways the entrapment and anguish of the individual in increasingly grotesque situations and the self's quest for identity from within.
Beckett's first play, Eleutheria (1947), was published for the first time in 1995, in an English translation, after a protracted dispute between Barney Rosset, Beckett's friend and American publisher and Beckett's family and his French publishers -- who did not want it printed because Beckett himself had judged the play a failure.
www.discoverfrance.net /France/Theatre/Beckett/beckett.shtml   (685 words)

  
 Samuel Beckett <failagain>
Samuel Beckett was a novelist as well as a playwright, and indeed it might be argued that his greatest work is contained in his novel and prose works and that the plays are secondary.
Beckett himself was of this view and saw himself as a novelist who also wrote plays.
This, although Beckett's first novel, (written in 1932) was not published until until after his death.
www.bebo.com /failagain   (495 words)

  
 Samuel Beckett Resources and Links
Samuel Beckett is sui generis...He has given a voice to the decrepit and maimed and inarticulate, men and women at the end of their tether, past pose or pretense, past claim of meaningful existence.
For Beckett, those years leading up to his most productive period had been an elaborate war nightmare — for instance here's where he had to live for six months — a nightmare Beckett never wrote about directly although allusions to it are everywhere in his texts of the postwar decade.
Beckett, un écrivain devant Dieu par Jean Onimus.
www.samuel-beckett.net   (8604 words)

  
 Raise a glass to Samuel Beckett. The Irishman who stands tall in the pantheon of playwrights would be 100.
Samuel Beckett would have turned 100 years old Thursday and celebrations of his part of the century are in full swing -- not so much here as elsewhere in the world he astonished and redefined through his work.
Another new addition to the prodigious library of Beckett studies is a beautifully printed Shoemaker Hoard centennial reissue of poet Anne Atik's "How It Was" (first published in '01), a personal memoir of her and her husband, painter Avigdor Arikha's decades-long friendship with Beckett in Paris.
Beckett loved to recite poetry, and quote long passages from Dante and Petrarch (in Italian), the entire range of German literature, the Bible (in several languages), Shakespeare, Milton, Rimbaud, Keats, Yeats, Neruda and many others.
www.sfgate.com /cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/04/14/DDGBEI8CU21.DTL   (1515 words)

  
 Samuel Beckett
Beckett's most famous work, premiered in Paris in 1953, and the theater was changed forever, its limits and conventions dashed to bits.
Beckett produced a number of lesser-known works which continued to stretch the boundaries of what was possible and acceptable in the theater.
Beckett's subject, both onstage and onpage, has always been the same-- a dialogue between, and search for, the many levels of self: I tell the story; I listen to myself tell the story; I know I am listening to myself tell the story; none of me knows if it's the right one.
www.bb10k.com /Beckett.html   (1583 words)

  
 Samuel Beckett Biography
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), the Irish novelist, playwright, and poet who became French by adoption, was one of the most original and important writers of the century.
Samuel Beckett, whose play Waiting for Godot has influenced several generations of contemporary playwrights throughout the world, was a dramatist who considered himself a much better novelist.
Samuel Beckett is an Irishman who has lived in France since 1938 and who has written much of his drama and fiction in French.
www.bookrags.com /Samuel_Beckett   (392 words)

  
 Amazon.com: Samuel Beckett: Deirdre Bair: Books
Beckett rebelled against this treatment from an early age, and the regular campaigns of psychological torture which his mother launched whenever things didn't go her way were to lead to his years of misery, repeated bouts of serious physical illness, and eventually to the full-blown psychosis which is evident in certain of his works.
The story of Beckett's life and his extreme sufferings and spiritual anguish, as told by Deirdre Bair, is both horrifying and fascinating, and she does seem to have done her best to present it as objectively as possible, though she does allow her distaste for certain of his views to peek through at times.
Thus, as Beckett recanted when he stated Celine's Journey to the End of the Night was the greastest novel in the English language before pausing and explaining that Joyce is on a level that no one should have to be compared, I must state this is a good effort on Bair's behalf.
www.amazon.com /Samuel-Beckett-Deirdre-Bair/dp/0671691732   (1194 words)

  
 Samuel Beckett, existentialism and Samuel Beckett, the Realm of Existentialism at DividingLine.com
Samuel Beckett, existentialism and Samuel Beckett, the Realm of Existentialism at DividingLine.com
Beckett is known to a wider audience for his absurdist plays, such as Waiting for Godot and Krapp's Last Tape.
Beckett came from a Protestant Anglo-Irish family, but much of his work was first written in French.
www.dividingline.com /private/Philosophy/Philosophers/Beckett/absurd.shtml   (291 words)

  
 Samuel Beckett News - The New York Times
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) is to the modern drama what James Joyce, his fellow Irishman and one-time employer, is to the modern novel: a father and patron saint whose shadow stretches inescapably into the 21st century.
Beckett worked as Joyce's assistant while living in Paris as a student, and his novels — especially his great trilogy of "Molloy," "Malone Dies" and "The Unnamable" — bear the imprint of his old mentor.
Beckett the Difficult, Beckett the Brash, Beckett the Prolific
topics.nytimes.com /top/reference/timestopics/people/b/samuel_beckett/index.html?inline=nyt-per   (443 words)

  
 Fathoms from Anywhere - A Samuel Beckett Centenary Exhibition
In doing honor to the man and the work on the occasion of the centennial of Beckett’s birth (on 13 April 1906), however one may define them, it would seem pointless to push claims, to struggle with rankings or to make sweeping historical assays.
Beckett was still alive when that exhibition opened.
The exhibition was not then and is not now intended to be a year-by-year survey of Samuel Beckett’s life or a definitive catalogue of his work.
www.hrc.utexas.edu /exhibitions/web/beckett/intro   (375 words)

  
 Samuel Beckett
"'Traduttore, traditore': Samuel Beckett's Translation of Mercier et Camier." Examines the French and English versions of Mercier and Camier to demonstrate that Beckett's self-translations are not always identical twins.
"Beckett and the Temptation of Solipsism," on Beckett's exploration of the philosophical notion of solipsism, not as a theme, but a proposition to be played with and ultimately deconstructed.
Beckett uses the game of chess to explore the tension between the mathematical and symmetrical, and the organic and asymmetrical, say the authors.
www.literaryhistory.com /20thC/Beckett.htm   (1164 words)

Try your search on: Qwika (all wikis)

Factbites
  About us   |   Why use us?   |   Reviews   |   Press   |   Contact us  
Copyright © 2005-2007 www.factbites.com Usage implies agreement with terms.