‘Ever Know What Happened?’: Shades and Echoes in Samuel Beckett's Television Plays

Ackerley, Chris

doi:10.3366/e0309520709000326

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 5 publications

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“…In Nacht und Träume , ‘the empty room with its rectangle of light and the black-coated figure hunched over the table’ resembles seventeenth-century Dutch paintings (Ackerley 2009: 155). The chiaroscuro effects prevalent in Beckett’s works are also significant in this teleplay.…”

Section: Cosmic Matrix In Quad Nacht Und Träume and Was Womentioning

confidence: 99%

Intermedial Performativity and the Human Mind in Samuel Beckett’s Teleplays

Chen

2023

European Review

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Samuel Beckett’s corpus centres on the characterization, examination and imaginative exploration of the human mind, encompassing the realms of consciousness, cognition and perception. In his teleplays, this focus is distinctively achieved through the performances of different media, which this article refers to as ‘intermedial performativity’. This term not only designates the semiotic contents of performance in intermedial forms, but also highlights the cooperative performances of the material media themselves, along with their uncharted possibilities and effects. This article delves into the ways in which intermedial performativity in Beckett’s teleplays realizes several unique configurations of the human mind, such as its split state and its transfiguration to a posthuman condition. This exploration not only sheds light on Beckett’s artistic vision and cosmic ontology, but also brings attention to the reverberations and implications of intermediality for humanity and its potential transformations.

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Section: Cosmic Matrix In Quad Nacht Und Träume and Was Womentioning

confidence: 99%

Intermedial Performativity and the Human Mind in Samuel Beckett’s Teleplays

Chen

2023

European Review

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"Primeval mud impenetrable dark": Towards an Annotation of Comment c'est/How It Is

Ackerley¹

2011

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Spatial diagrams and geometrical reasoning in the theater

Degani-Raz

2021

Semiotica

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This article offers an analysis of the cognitive role of diagrammatic movements in the theater. Based on the recognition of a theatrical work’s inherent ability to provide new insights concerning reality, the article concentrates on the way by which actors’ movements on stage create spatial diagrams that can provide new insights into the spectators’ world. The suggested model of theater’s epistemology results from a combination of Charles S. Peirce’s doctrine of diagrammatic reasoning and David Lewis’s theoretical account of the truth value of counterfactual conditionals. I argue that in several theatrical works – in particular those whose central image is dominated by movements – the relation of what Lewis names “comparative overall similarity” between the fictional and the actual world is based on diagrammatic homology. The cognitive process involved in deciphering them is, hence, based on diagrammatic reasoning. The main emphasis of the analysis is on the previously unnoticed but important cognitive role of observation in the theater: the idea that observation takes an active role in the reasoning process that enables the spectators to form new knowledge about their actual world. Samuel Beckett’s plays Quad and Come and Go serve here as case studies.

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‘Ever Know What Happened?’: Shades and Echoes in Samuel Beckett's Television Plays

Cited by 6 publications

References 5 publications

Intermedial Performativity and the Human Mind in Samuel Beckett’s Teleplays

Intermedial Performativity and the Human Mind in Samuel Beckett’s Teleplays

"Primeval mud impenetrable dark": Towards an Annotation of Comment c'est/How It Is

Spatial diagrams and geometrical reasoning in the theater

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