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-Pichat prided himself on unwavering fidelity to his friends as well as to the republican cause. His friendships linked past and present, illustrating both the enduring quality of many of his personal relationships and the evolution of his friendship circles along with his political activism. While Louis Ulbach and François Favre were absorbed in their careers as journalists and writers, Laurent
Beckett’s Afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to posthumous reworkings of Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre. Contextualised against the backdrop of his own developing views on adaptation and media specificity, it nuances the long-held view that he opposed any form of genre crossing. Featuring contemporary engagements with Beckett’s work from the UK, Europe, the USA and Latin America, the volume does not approach adaptation as a form of (in)fidelity or (ir)reverence. Instead, it argues that exposing the ‘Beckett canon’ to new environments and artistic practices enables fresh perspectives on the texts and enhances their significance for contemporary artists and audiences alike. The featured essays explore a wide variety of forms (prose, theatre, performance, dance, ballet, radio, music, television, film, visual art, installation, new/digital media, webseries, etc.), in different cultural contexts, mainly from the early 1990s until the late 2010s. The concept of adaptation is broadly interpreted, including changes within the same performative context, to spatial relocations or transpositions across genres and media, even creative rewritings of Beckett’s biography. The collection offers a range of innovative ways to approach the author’s work in a constantly changing world and analyses its remarkable susceptibility to creative responses. Viewed from this perspective, Beckett’s Afterlives suggests that adaptation, remediation and appropriation constitute forms of cultural negotiation that are essential for the survival as well as the continuing urgency and vibrancy of Beckett’s work in the twenty-first century.
Nothing' has been at the centre of Samuel Beckett's reception and scholarship from its inception. This book explains how the Beckett oeuvre, through its paradoxical fidelity to nothing, produces critical approaches which aspire to putting an end to interpretation: in this instance, the issues of authority, intertextuality and context, which this book tackles via 'nothing'. By retracing the history of Beckett studies through 'nothing', it theorises a future for the study of Beckett's legacies and is interested in the constant problem of value in the oeuvre. Through the relation between Beckett and nothing, the relation between voice and stone in Jean-Paul Sartre and Beckett, we are reminded precisely of the importance of the history of an idea, even the ideas of context, influence, and history. The book looks at something that has remained a 'nothing' within the Beckett canon so far: his doodles as they appear in the Human Wishes manuscript. It also looks at the material history of televisual production and places the aesthetic concerns of Beckett's television plays. The book then discusses the nexus between nothing and silence in order to analyse the specific relations between music, sound, and hearing. It talks about the history of materiality through that of neurology and brings the two into a dialogue sustained by Beckett texts, letters and notebooks. The book investigates the role of nothing through three works called neither and Neither: Beckett's short text, Morton Feldman's opera, and Doris Salcedo's sculptural installation.
-war decades that seemed to herald ‘the long-expected death of the capitalist system’, Read began to reassess his involvement in the war.7 What emerged was an anarchistic reading of his military life that offered a novel model of socialist militarism, one that looked to small-group ‘fidelity’ as an abiding lesson of the war, rather than the power of collectivism.8 A world of broken mirrors: remembering, rethinking and post-war disillusionment In another letter sent to Read in 1930, Aldington reflected on the difficulties of writing about the war: But that is the whole
demonstrate that these general conceptions of the inter-relation between the trilogy and its philosophical sources unwittingly replicate well-worn arguments from adaptation theory, specifically the criterion of fidelity to the original work. Much of the writing on the trilogy offers the films one of two options: to be celebrated as accurate albeit derivative, or castigated for misrepresenting the original sources: good example or bad philosophy. Discussions of the ways in which the trilogy takes up Jean Baudrillard’s work have been dominated by the question of fidelity to
countryside was where marriages were most often lived out. The more McGahern spurned media and newspapers, the more its exponents loved and honoured him – and this persisted even after he was gone. It was as if his ‘Great Refusal’ secretly fed their own disillusion with a life they had chosen, as if his imperviousness to media was the ultimate seal of writerly integrity. His admirers often intended to abandon journalism and embrace art, not noticing that he had done so from a very early age, with a faith in his abilities that few could match. Because of his fidelity to the
aspects of it, to the screen. Lovecraft himself judged films based on literary works solely according to their fidelity to their source, concluding that: ‘Generally speaking, the cinema always cheapens and degrades any literary material it gets hold of – especially anything in the least subtle or unusual’ (quoted in Joshi, 1996 : 581). Dismissive as he was of his own work, and detesting as he did most
chapter of Madame Bovary, which describes Charles’s schooldays, early adulthood, and first marriage; and in consequence, none attempts to represent Charles’s impossible hat. By omitting the unrepresentable, it is as if the filmmakers have understood that Flaubert’s novel is also deeply unfilmable. The point I want to underline here is that the description of Charles’s hat is an aesthetic enactment of what, thematically, will appear in the novel in the story of adultery. To commit adultery is to break a promise of fidelity, to appear to comply with and then to deny a
‘hideous progeny and the mutating narrative of the Frankenstein story can be considered a critical lens for understanding adaptation’ (25); in the end, such an approach clears a critical space, one ‘that moves viewers and readers beyond their comfort with inherited boundaries and pre-existing patterns’ (1). The idea that a further unpacking of the specific work of intertextuality is necessary within adaptation studies is far from new. Robert Stam’s seminal 2000 essay, ‘Beyond Fidelity: the Dialogics of Adaptation’, identifies adaptation as an
relative level of expertise and experience will certainly govern the reader's attention to and expectations for all of the above-mentioned areas of intimacy with the source text by way of the translation. But there is a problem, related precisely to these expectations, which winds up being coded as ‘fidelity’ – how closely does the translation follow the word-for-word sense and meaning of the source text? – vs. ‘creativity’ – what kinds of liberties are taken, how ‘poetic’ is the translation? There is an assumption that greater accuracy with respect