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9781474452700

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"[This] monograph contains a wealth of detail about performance art practices that contextualize Breath. This strategy marks the book out as a novel attempt to account for Beckett's relationship to the visual arts and the crossovers between live performance and static visuality, and breath and the act of respiration as the staging ground for thinking through this intermediality.--Trish McTighe ""Journal of Beckett Studies, Volume 28 Issue 2"" Ms Sozita Goudouna's book left me breathless.-- ""Simon Critchley, New School for Social Research"" So, you may well ask, how exactly did Sozita Goudouna manage to write Beckett's Breath: Anti-Theatricality and the Visual Arts, a 218-page book with a somewhat small type font? Surely this is the most ever said about the least in the entire history of literary criticism. Quite lucidly, the author's thesis positions Breath exactly within the traditions of stagecraft, eloquently asserting its uniqueness as a performance.....The genius of Beckett's wordless reiteration ( a deliberate oxymoron) is that this Shakespearean thought gets re-expressed on stage motionlessly, characterlessly, actorlessly, dramatically, even eloquently, in a mere thirty-five seconds, yet it manages to convey an existential truth -- the ultimate reduction ab absurdo of the life cycle -- that is applicable to every mortal who ever lived, regardless of creed, regardless of ideology. That Sozita Goudouna has turned the analysis of Beckett's one-page work into a 200-plus paged study is remarkable, not least for tis cogent and well documented antifloccinaucinihilipilificationistical view.--Professor William Hutchings ""Comparative Drama Series"""

[This] monograph contains a wealth of detail about performance art practices that contextualize Breath. This strategy marks the book out as a novel attempt to account for Beckett's relationship to the visual arts and the crossovers between live performance and static visuality, and breath and the act of respiration as the staging ground for thinking through this intermediality.--Trish McTighe ""Journal of Beckett Studies, Volume 28 Issue 2"" Ms Sozita Goudouna's book left me breathless.-- ""Simon Critchley, New School for Social Research"" So, you may well ask, how exactly did Sozita Goudouna manage to write Beckett's Breath: Anti-Theatricality and the Visual Arts, a 218-page book with a somewhat small type font? Surely this is the most ever said about the least in the entire history of literary criticism. Quite lucidly, the author's thesis positions Breath exactly within the traditions of stagecraft, eloquently asserting its uniqueness as a performance.....The genius of Beckett's wordless reiteration ( a deliberate oxymoron) is that this Shakespearean thought gets re-expressed on stage motionlessly, characterlessly, actorlessly, dramatically, even eloquently, in a mere thirty-five seconds, yet it manages to convey an existential truth -- the ultimate reduction ab absurdo of the life cycle -- that is applicable to every mortal who ever lived, regardless of creed, regardless of ideology. That Sozita Goudouna has turned the analysis of Beckett's one-page work into a 200-plus paged study is remarkable, not least for tis cogent and well documented antifloccinaucinihilipilificationistical view.--Professor William Hutchings ""Comparative Drama Series""

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Sozita Goudouna is the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Performa Institute in New York and Teaching Fellow at New York University. She co-curated, with Paul B. Preciado, a project for 'The Parliament of Bodies' at Documenta 14 and worked for the Onassis Foundation in NYC.

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