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Part of the book series: New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century (NIBTFC)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
Reviews
"McTighe, in an elegantly written, wide-ranging study of Beckett's dramas, focusing mainly on the late plays but relevant to his entire corpus, provides an original and much-needed way of approaching the complex issues related to Beckett's depiction of bodies - at once material yet intangible, solid yet fragmented, there yet not there - and the equally complex issues arising from such tensions and contradictions. Building on theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy, McTighe argues for the importance of the haptic or tactile in approaching not only the physical but also the philosophical, religious, ethical, artistic, and performative forms and failures of contacts and connections through touch in Beckett's works. In carefully-argued close readings of selected plays, divided into chapters according to a particular sensory organ of touch - eye, ear, mouth, skin, hand - she illustrates how Beckett creates bodies as material presences which deny the possibilities of their own materiality, as delineations which ultimately point to the impossibility of delineation of somatic experience in art and life." - Linda Ben-Zvi, Professor Emerita, Theatre Studies, Tel Aviv University, Israel
"The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama is a beautifully written and imaginatively structured exploration of acts of touch or not touching in Beckett's drama for stage and screen. The book's striking originality and significance lie in its lively engagement with a rich set of aesthetic and critical writing on the haptic, making an important contribution to studies of Beckett and phenomenology, aesthetics, embodiment, and technology. Nancy's interpretation of touch connects it with Christian iconography and McTighe weaves discussions of doubting Thomas and the Noli me Tangere scene between Christ and Mary Magdalene throughout the book, exploring touch at the borderline between visceral flesh and the resurrected 'body of light', the withdrawal of touch, and forms of tactful or ethical touching. Offering compelling new readings of Beckett's drama for stage, film, and television, McTighe demonstrates beyond doubt the centrality of touch in all its senses and complexities to Beckett's work." - Anna McMullan, Professor of Theatre, University of Reading, UK
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama
Authors: Trish McTighe
Series Title: New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137275332
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan New York
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature Collection, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: Trish McTighe 2013
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-27698-8Published: 17 June 2013
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-44692-6Published: 17 June 2013
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-27533-2Published: 04 December 2015
Series ISSN: 2945-6797
Series E-ISSN: 2945-6800
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 196
Topics: Literary History, Twentieth-Century Literature, British and Irish Literature, Literary Theory