Beckett's Breath: Anti-Theatricality and the Visual Arts

Examines the intersection of Samuel Beckett's thirty-second playlet Breath with the visual arts
Samuel Beckett, one of the most prominent playwrights of the twentieth century, wrote a thirty-second playlet for the stage that does not include actors, text, characters or drama but only stage directions. Breath (1969) is the focus and the only theatrical text examined in this study, which demonstrates how the piece became emblematic of the interdisciplinary exchanges that occur in Beckett's later writings, and of the cross-fertilisation of the theatre with the visual arts. The book attends to fifty breath-related artworks (including sculpture, painting, new media, sound art, performance art) and contextualises Beckett's Breath within the intermedial and high-modernist discourse thereby contributing to the expanding field of intermedial Beckett criticism.
Key Features
Examines Beckett's ultimate venture to define the borders between a theatrical performance and purely visual representationJuxtaposes Beckett's Breath with breath-related artworks by prominent visual artists who investigate the far-reaching potential of the representation of respiration by challenging modernist essentialismThe focus on this primary human physiological function and its relation to arts and culture is highly pertinent to studies of human performance, the nature of embodiment and its relation to cultural expressionFacilitates new intermedial discourses around the nature and aesthetic possibilities of breath, the minimum condition of existence, at the interface between the visual arts and performance practices and their relation to questions of spectacle, objecthood and materiality

Author: Sozita Goudouna
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 08/07/2019
Pages: 232
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.10w x 0.30d
ISBN: 9781474452700

About the Author

Sozita Goudouna is the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Performa Institute in New York and Teaching Fellow at New York University. She co-curated, with Paul B. Preciado, a project for 'The Parliament of Bodies' at Documenta 14 and worked for the Onassis Foundation in NYC.