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*AUTHOR-APPROVED* 'A book on Beckett and Bergson is long overdue. Creative Involution offers a new and exciting angle that is of crucial importance to the understanding of the author's work. This groundbreaking monograph is a notable contribution to Beckett studies.' Ulrika Maude, University of Bristol An original philosophical approach to one of the twentieth century's most important literary figures That Modernism is inherently transgressive, amorphous, protean - that it is a 'Breaking Things Open, Breaking Words Open', as Gilles Deleuze suggests - is one of the tenets of this study. Modernism can be said to blur distinctions radically, between past and present, between interior and exterior, between being and becoming, an inward turn that we call 'involution'. Creative Involution uncovers new ways of understanding this philosophical trajectory, one that not only had a profound impact on philosophy and critical theory, but on both cosmopolitan, contemporary culture more broadly and on artistic experiment and expression in particular. The principal line followed through this study begins with Henri Bergson's rethinking of time, memory and the ancillary issues of perception and consciousness that revolutionised philosophical, artistic and performance theory early in the twentieth century. It explores how the work of Samuel Beckett shares Bergson's obsessions, with time as a 'double headed monster', with memory and multiplicity, with being and becoming - preoccupations that continue to reverberate through the work of Gilles Deleuze. Key Features - Deploys new critical approaches (a return to Bergson and Bergsonism, in particular) - Addresses underexplored works in the Beckett canon - Presents new critiques of representation and of Beckett's relationship to philosophy - Attentive to critical thinking around affect theory and/in literature S. E. Gontarski is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University and a leading scholar of Modernism and the work of Samuel Beckett. Cover image: 730.4 Samuel Beckett, Paris, May 1961 by Michael Peto (c) University of Dundee, The Peto Collection Cover design: Stuart Dalziel [EUP logo] www.euppublishing.com ISBN [please add within the barcode box, at the top] 978-0-7486-9732-8 Barcode
About the author
S. E. Gontarski is Robert O. Lawton University Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Florida State University. He is the author and editor of many publications the most recent of which are:
Burroughs Unbound: William Burroughs and the Performance of Writing (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) and
Tennessee Williams, T-shirt Modernism and the Refashionings of Theater (Anthem Impact Books, 2021). He is also the author of
Beckett Matters: Essays on Beckett's Late Modernism (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) and
Creative Involution: Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) and the editor of
The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2014)
Summary
''Creative Involution: Bergson, Beckett Deleuze' focuses on a philosophical trajectory that not only had a profound impact on critical thought of the 20th and now 21st centuries, but on cosmopolitan, contemporary culture more broadly and on artistic experiment and expression in particular.
