Beckett's Thing: Painting and Theatre - Paperback

by David Lloyd (Author)

Explores Samuel Beckett's relation to painting and the visual imagination that informs his theatrical work

Beckett was deeply engaged with the visual arts and individual painters, including Jack B. Yeats, Bram van Velde, and Avigdor Arikha. In this monograph, David Lloyd explores what Beckett saw in their paintings. He explains what visual resources Beckett found in these particular painters rather than in the surrealism of Masson or the abstraction of Kandinsky or Mondrian. The analysis of Beckett's visual imagination is based on his criticism and on close analysis of the paintings he viewed. Lloyd shows how Beckett's fascination with these painters illuminates the 'painterly' qualities of his theatre and the philosophical, political and aesthetic implications of Beckett's highly visual dramatic work.

Key Features

• Discusses Beckett's relationship with three painters crucial to his life-long dialogue with the visual arts
• The first book to examine the paintings that Beckett would have known and on which he based his critical remarks
• Accounts for the increasing visuality of Beckett's theatre in relation to his evolving appreciation of painting and the formal questions posed by that medium
• Explores Beckett's anticipation of European phenomenology and psychoanalysis in relation to Heidegger and Lacan

Front Jacket

'This highly original constellation of critical dialogues will galvanise Beckett Studies. David Lloyd both disturbs and enhances emerging debates in and among philosophical, ethical, aesthetic and political discourses, as they respond to pressures arising from neo-liberalisation on understandings of human subjectivity and its representability. This book reconfigures how Samuel Beckett's work will be seen and read across a range of fields of enquiry.' Victor Merriman, Edge Hill University Explores Samuel Beckett's relation to painting and the visual imagination that informs his theatrical work Beckett was deeply engaged with the visual arts and individual painters, including Jack B. Yeats, Bram van Velde and Avigdor Arikha. David Lloyd explores what Beckett saw in their paintings, explaining the visual resources he found in these particular painters rather than in the surrealism of Masson or the abstraction of Kandinsky or Mondrian. The analysis of Beckett's visual imagination is based on his criticism and on close analysis of the paintings he viewed. Lloyd shows how Beckett's fascination with these painters illuminates the 'painterly' qualities of his theatre and the philosophical, political and aesthetic implications of Beckett's highly visual dramatic work. David Lloyd is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Lloyd's scholarship primarily addresses Irish literature, culture and colonialism. He has published several volumes of poetry. His books include Irish Times: Temporalities of Irish Modernity (2008) and Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity: The Transformation of Oral Space (2011). Cover image: Bram van Velde, Sans Titre [Untitled ] (Montrouge ) (oil on canvas, 144.5cm x 113 cm, 1947), (c) Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, 2016 Cover design: [EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN 978-1-4744-1572-9 Barcode

Author Biography

David Lloyd is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. His most recent books are Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (2019) and Beckett's Thing: Theatre and Painting (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).