Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-wg55d Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-01T09:16:15.777Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Lessons in Blindness from Samuel Beckett

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Peggy Phelan
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Reading samuel beckett made me want to link literary and visual studies, although when i first began to love his work, I did not understand that these were different disciplines. A graduate student in the English department at Rutgers University, I read Waiting for Godot while sitting on the floor of my dorm room. I remember really squinting at the pages, trying both to read every word of the play and to see it on a stage in my mind. When I finished, I was convinced I had read the dialogue to a painting. What confused me was whether the painting existed before the play or whether Beckett was trying to create it in the play's performance.

Type
The Changing Profession
Information
PMLA , Volume 119 , Issue 5 , October 2004 , pp. 1279 - 1288
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. New York: Grove, 1970.Google Scholar
Beckett, Samuel. Fin de partie. Fin de partie, suivi de Acte sans paroles. Paris: Minuit, 1957. 13–112.Google Scholar
Beckett, Samuel. Fizzles. New York: Grove, 1976.Google Scholar
Beckett, Samuel. “MacGreevy on Yeats”. Irish Times 4 Aug. 1945. Rpt. in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. Ruby, Cohn. New York: Grove, 1984. 95–97.Google Scholar
Beckett, Samuel. “Three Dialogues”. Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. Ruby, Cohn. New York: Grove, 1984. 138–45.Google Scholar
Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove, 1954.Google Scholar
Ben-Zvi, Linda, ed. Drawing on Beckett: Portraits, Performances, and Cultural Contexts. Tel Aviv: Assaph, 2003.Google Scholar
Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse, Dutoit. Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Field, Richard S. “The Making of Foirades/Fizzles.” Foirades/Fizzles: Echo and Allusion in the Art of Jasper Johns. Los Angeles: Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, U of California, Los Angeles, 1987. 99–126.Google Scholar
Foirades/Fizzles. Texts by Samuel Beckett. Etchings and lithograph by Jasper Johns. London: Petersburg, 1976.Google Scholar
Johns, Jasper. Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews. Ed. Kirk, Varnedoe. New York: Museum of Mod. Art, 1996.Google Scholar
Kligman, Ruth. Love Affair: A Memoir of Jackson Pollock. New York: Morrow, 1974.Google Scholar
Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1996.Google Scholar
Mitchel, Breon, and Lois More, Overbeck, eds. Word and Image: Samuel Beckett and the Visual Text / Mot et image: Samuel Beckett et le texte visuel. Atlanta: Robert W. Woodruff Lib., Emory U, 1999.Google Scholar
Oppenheim, Lois. The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett's Dialogue with Art. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perloff, Marjorie. “‘Light Silence, Dark Speech’: Reading Johns's Images, Seeing Beckett's Language in Foirades/Fizzles”. Fulcrum 1 (2002): 83–105.Google Scholar
Phelan, Peggy. “Shards of a History of Performance Art: Pollock and Namuth through a Glass, Darkly”. A Companion to Narrative Theory. Ed. Peter, Rabinowitz and James, Phelan. Malden: Blackwell, forthcoming 2005.Google Scholar
Potter, Jeffrey. To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock. New York: Putnam, 1985.Google Scholar
Prinz, Jessica. “Foirades/Fizzles / Beckett/Johns”. Contemporary Literature 21 (1980): 480–510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pyle, Hilary. Jack B. Yeats: His Watercolours, Drawings, and Pastels. Dublin: Irish Academic, 1993.Google Scholar
Rodman, Selden. Conversations with Artists. New York: Devin-Adair, 1957.Google Scholar
Rose, Marilyn Gaddis. Jack B. Yeats: Painter and Poet. Berne: Lang, 1972.Google Scholar
Rosenberg, Harold. “The American Action Painters”. Artnews Dec. 1952: 22+.Google Scholar
Rosenthal, T. G. The Art of Jack B. Yeats. London: Deutsch, 1993.Google Scholar
Schimmel, Paul. “Leap into the Void: Performance and the Object”. Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998. 17–119.Google Scholar