Overview
Examines the intersection of Samuel Beckett's thirty-second playlet Breath with the visual arts Samuel Beckett, one of the most prominent playwrights of the twentieth century, wrote a thirty-second playlet for the stage that does not include actors, text, characters or drama but only stage directions. Breath (1969) is the focus and the only theatrical text examined in this study, which demonstrates how the piece became emblematic of the interdisciplinary exchanges that occur in Beckett's later writings, and of the cross-fertilisation of the theatre with the visual arts. The book attends to fifty breath-related artworks (including sculpture, painting, new media, sound art, performance art) and contextualises Beckett's Breath within the intermedial and high-modernist discourse thereby contributing to the expanding field of intermedial Beckett criticism. Key Features Examines Beckett's ultimate venture to define the borders between a theatrical performance and purely visual representationJuxtaposes Beckett's Breath with breath-related artworks by prominent visual artists who investigate the far-reaching potential of the representation of respiration by challenging modernist essentialismThe focus on this primary human physiological function and its relation to arts and culture is highly pertinent to studies of human performance, the nature of embodiment and its relation to cultural expressionFacilitates new intermedial discourses around the nature and aesthetic possibilities of breath, the minimum condition of existence, at the interface between the visual arts and performance practices and their relation to questions of spectacle, objecthood and materiality
Full Product Details
Author: Sozita Goudouna (Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, Performa Institute, New York)
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Imprint: Edinburgh University Press
Weight: 0.429kg
ISBN: 9781474421645
ISBN 10: 1474421644
Pages: 232
Publication Date: 09 February 2018
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Undergraduate
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
[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"""
[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 * 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 * Ms Sozita Goudouna’s book left me breathless. * Simon Critchley, New School for Social Research *
Author Information
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.
