Author: Andrew Gibson File Type: pdf Writer Samuel Beckett (190689) is known for depicting a world of abject misery, failure, and absurdity in his many plays, novels, short stories, and poetry. Yet the despair in his work is never absolute, instead it is intertwined with black humor and an indomitable will to endurecharacteristics best embodied by his most famous characters, Vladimir and Estragon, in the play Waiting for Godot. Beckett himself was a supremely modern, minimalist writer who deeply distrusted biographies and resisted letting himself be pigeonholed by easy interpretation or single definition. Andrew Gibsons accessible critical biography overcomes Becketts reticence and carefully considers the writers work in relation to the historical circumstances of his life. In Samuel Beckett, Gibson tracks Beckett from Ireland after independence to Paris in the late 1920s, from London in the 30s to Nazi Germany and Vichy France, and finally through the cold war to the fall of communism in the late 80s. Gibson narrates the progression of Becketts life as a writerfrom a student in Ireland to the 1969 Nobel Prize winner for literaturethrough chapters that examine individual historical events and the works that grew out of those experiences. A notoriously private figure, Beckett sought refuge from life in his work, where he expressed his disdain for the suffering and unnecessary absurdity of much that he witnessed. This concise and engaging biography provides an essential understanding of Becketts work in response to many of the most significant events of the past century. The life of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) has been the subject of exhaustive scholarship, yet by contrast Beckett himself was a spare, minimalist writer who deeply distrusted the techniques of biography. In this new, concise, critical account of Becketts life and work, Andrew Gibson seeks to remain faithful to the writers artistic aims, staying close to Becketts style of thought and work in his analysis of this supremely modern figure. Becketts Rockaby ends with a resounding fuck life Samuel Beckett takes as its touchstone the formidable Beckettian drive to give up on the world. Gibson locates the logic of Becketts drive through an analysis of his responses to modern history, showing how Beckett came to have an unusually profound feeling for the Zeitgeist, and a power of conveying it unrivalled by any other contemporary artist. This book tracks Becketts painful progress through the historical situations that defined his experience Ireland after independence, Paris and the Aecole Normale Superieure in the late twenties, London in the thirties, Nazi Germany, Vichy France, the early years of the Fourth Republic, the Cold War and the triumph of Capital in the 1980s. It also analyses the (often muted and oblique) traces of and responses to these situations in a range of Becketts works. As Gibson cogently argues, Beckett was devastated by modern history without being finally completely overpowered by it. He shows that Beckett espoused an extreme version of the Romantic doctrine that art is a criticism of historical forms of life, but also that Becketts version is wryly ironical and perverse, for it stubbornly refuses to assume that life can ever say its final word.Review[The book] undoubtedly sheds light on the historical circumstances that informed [Becketts] texts, and there are many interesting details that allow us to see his literary achievement more clearly. (Times Literary Supplement) This new biography . . . considers the writers work in relation to the historical circumstances of his life and provides an original insight into one of Irelands greatest writers. (Irish Post) About the AuthorAndrew Gibson is professor of modern literature and theory at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is coeditor of London from Punk to Blair and the author of Joyces Revenge History, Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses and James Joyce, also published by Reaktion Books.

Author: Christy Mag Uidhir File Type: pdf Although few philosophers agree about what it is for something to be art, most, if not all, agree on one thing art must be in some sense intention dependent. Art and Art-Attempts is about what follows from taking intention dependence seriously as a substantive necessary condition for somethings being art. Christy Mag Uidhir argues that from the assumption that art must be the product of intentional action, along with basic action-theoretic account of attempts (goal-oriented intention-directed activity), follows a host of sweeping implications for philosophical enquiry into the nature of art and its principal relata such as authorship, art forms, and art ontology e.g., DT An informative distinction between art, non-art, and failed-art that any viable theory of art must capture.DT A far more productive minimal framework for authorship not only capable of systematically addressing issues of collective authorship appropriation, etc. but also one according to which artists just are authors.DT A coherent and structurally precise account of art forms based upon the relation between artists, artworks, and the sortal properties thereof.DT A unified and far less metaphysically suspect ontology of art according to which if there are such things as artworks, then artworks must be concrete things.Ultimately, Mag Uidhir aims neither to propose nor to defend any particular, precise answer to the question What is art? Instead, he shows the ways in which taking intention-dependence seriously as a substantive necessary condition for being art can be profoundly revelatory, and perhaps even radically revisionary, as to the scope and limits of what any particular, precise answer to such a question could viably be.**