Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art

This groundbreaking collection from scholars and artists on the legacy of Beckett in contemporary art provides readers with a unique view of this important writer for page, stage, and screen. The volume argues that Beckett is more than an influence on contemporary art—he is, in fact, a contemporary artist, working alongside artists across disciplines in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond. The volume explores Beckett’s formal experiments in drama, prose, and other media as contemporary, parallel revisions of modernism’s theoretical presuppositions congruent with trends like Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Containing interviews with and pieces by working artists, alongside contributions of scholars of literature and the visual arts, this collection offers an essential reassessment of Beckett’s work. Perceiving Beckett’s ongoing importance from the perspective of contemporary art practices, dominated by installation and conceptual strategies, it offers a completely new frame through which to read perennial Beckettian themes of impotence, failure, and penury. From Beckett’s remains, as it were, contemporary artists find endless inspiration.

David Houston Jones is Professor of French and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter. He has published widely on modern French literature and Samuel Beckett and is the author of Installation Art and the Practices of Archivalism (2016), Samuel Beckett and Testimony (2011), and The Body Abject: Self and Text in Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett (2000). He most recently co-edited Assessing the Legacy of the Gueules cassées: from Surgery to Art, a special issue of the Journal of War and Culture Studies (2017). Robert Reginio is an Associate Professor in the Division of English at Alfred University in New York. He has published works on Samuel Beckett and Conceptual Art and Beckett’s engagement with the problem of history, in addition to essays on Bob Dylan and on Virginia Woolf. Katherine Weiss is a Professor in the Department of Literature and Language at East Tennessee State University. In addition to her work on Samuel Beckett, she has published on modern playwrights such as Sam Shepard and Tennessee Williams.

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