Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Słowo wstępne
- Foreword
- Część I Proza
- Fail again. Fail better. The Derivation of Beckett's Aesthetics
- Yeats, Joyce, Beckett and the Politics of Rejection
- Oppressive versus Liberating Silence. S. Beckett and J.M. Coetzee's Foe
- The Eye of the Other: Visuality in Ill Seen Ill Said
- Część II Dramat
- Contributors/Autorzy
The Eye of the Other: Visuality in Ill Seen Ill Said
from Część I - Proza
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Słowo wstępne
- Foreword
- Część I Proza
- Fail again. Fail better. The Derivation of Beckett's Aesthetics
- Yeats, Joyce, Beckett and the Politics of Rejection
- Oppressive versus Liberating Silence. S. Beckett and J.M. Coetzee's Foe
- The Eye of the Other: Visuality in Ill Seen Ill Said
- Część II Dramat
- Contributors/Autorzy
Summary
Ill Seen Ill Said (1981), often classified, albeit against the intentions of the author, as belonging to Beckett's second trilogy (Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho), is a text which, according to James Knowlson, “is best read as an exquisite prose poem.” Though the story is still written with a distinctively impersonal voice, a trademark of Beckettian style, it clearly departs from the “midget grammar” and “camera images” of his earlier work, e.g. Lessness and Fizzles. Instead of embarking on what would ultimately amount to a futile interpretation of the text, I will instead focus on certain themes which I consider not only prevalent in Beckett's texts but also indicative of a wider philosophical relation that exists between his works and the works of Maurice Blanchot whose philosophy will provide a conceptual framework for this paper. The title of Beckett's text will serve as a starting point for an elaboration on the link between sight and speech and, by extension, between vision and writing. This will lead to a consideration of the Blanchotian concept of writing and its applicability to Ill Seen Ill Said. It is the contention of this paper that Ill Seen Ill Said is a self-referential account of the writing process and, when approached within the question of visuality, will yield a reading which is attuned both to Blanchot's thoughts on the process of writing and to the antiocularcentric investment underpinning those thoughts.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Drama of the MindPapers from 'Beckett in Kraków 2006', pp. 47 - 56Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2008