Revisioning Beckett

There is much here for scholars of Beckett, and more broadly of modernism, decadence, drama and performance studies, literary theory, censorship, and history of the book ... He foregrounds Beckett’s modernist decadence as ever self-inventing and relating to the contemporary age. His discussions encourage important new lines of study, especially regarding performance studies, African American theater, prison theater, queer studies, and manuscript and archival studies, as well as attention to Beckett’s later prose, poetry, and drama. * Journal of Modern Literature *
Samuel Beckett is recognized as one who subverted the Modernist enterprise, not least by questioning the limits of language to create a reality with any stability prior to its own linguistic expression. The 'empirical turn' of the new century redefined a Beckett whose work (to echo Yeats) is not a rootless flower but the speech of a man. In Revisioning Beckett, S. E. Gontarski further confronts the 'decadent turn,' in a series of essays ranging from Beckett’s close readings of Max Nordau and the Marquis de Sade, through his surreal confrontations with censorship ('knitted doilies' to conceal genital warts) and the changing fashions of figuration, to the absurdist paradoxes of creation by undoing. * Chris Ackerley, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Otago, New Zealand *
This collection of Gontarski’s recent essays is essential reading for Beckett scholarship and for studies of Irish modernism more generally. Gontarski combines thoughtful research with an encyclopedic knowledge of Beckett. All the essays are original, provocative and the product of clear and vigorous thinking. * Sam Slote, Associate Professor of English, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland *
S. E. Gontarski brings a glorious variety of contexts – from modernist aesthetics to publishing and theatre practice – to bear in Revisioning Beckett. Underlying these absorbing re-enagements by a major critic is a conviction that the rich poverty of Beckett’s art is nourished by Decadence: the abiding fascination of the abject and despised. The essays collected here mediate that fascination afresh for a new generation of Beckett scholars and readers. * Erik Tonning, Professor of British Literature and Culture, University of Bergen, Norway *
It is the professional and theatrical lives Beckett led which are throwing up the real surprises [in this volume], and, thanks to Gontarski, these new stories are richly fascinating. Thank Godot for Stan Gontarski! -- Adam Piette * French Studies: A Quarterly Review *
This collection of occasional pieces offers important articulations of a piece with Gontarski’s sustained scholarship of over forty years. It is a compendium that offers numerous insights and interesting analyses largely accessible to the lay reader as well as to the Beckett scholar versed in Gontarski’s previous critical work. -- Barry Allen Spence * Skenè Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies *