This volume of the BDMP series charts the genesis of three iconic Beckett plays: Not I (1973), That Time (1976) and Footfalls (1976), all translated into French by their author. Including analyses of abandoned archival precursors - the 'Kilcool' drafts (1963) and the 'Petit Odeon' Fragments (1967-1968) - the book covers a crucial period in Beckett's playwriting career, during which his long-held ambition to stage a mouth babbling in the dark became a catalyst for some of his most innovative work. This volume provides a comprehensive guide to the history of the three plays, tracking their development from compositional manuscripts through to publication and performance. The book contends that these plays should be seen as stagings of the subject-object breakdown explored in Beckett's early writing. Drawing on the notes he took on psychology and psychoanalysis in 1934-1935, it examines the many psychological and psychoanalytic concepts that are used in the author's later stagings of the mind. The plays are analysed through the lens of enactive cognition: not as representations of particular psychological conditions, but as pieces which encourage active interpretation on the part of their audiences. By staging minds in states of breakdown that resist diagnosis, Not I / Pas moi, That Time / Cette fois and Footfalls / Pas enact the subject-object breakdown that is such a key part of Beckett's aesthetics.

his volume of the BDMP series charts the genesis of three iconic Beckett plays: Not I (1973), That Time (1976) and Footfalls (1976), all translated into French by their author. Including analyses of abandoned archival precursors - the 'Kilcool' drafts (1963) and the 'Petit Odeon' Fragments (1967-1968) - the book covers a crucial period in Beckett's playwriting career and offers a comprehensive guide to the history of the three plays, tracking their development from compositional manuscripts through to publication and performance.

About the Author
James Little is a postdoctoral researcher at Masaryk University, Brno and Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, where his research focuses on Irish writing, genetic criticism and performance. He is the author of Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space (2020).

Reviews
With this monograph, Little effectively convinces us that the successive drafts offer evidence of a heightening of interpretive ambiguity and uncertainty that blurs the line between self and other, inside and outside, reality and fiction. "Doing this", Little concludes, "will probably not solve the questions asked by these works - Who is Godot? What happened to Mouth in the field? Is May alive or dead? - but it can help us better understand how these questions are posed" (483). For all these reasons, this volume in the BDMP series is without doubt a highly commendable and very rewarding read for those researchers interested in an in-depth foray into Beckett's late theatre and creative mind. * Textual Cultures *
Little's book represents a significant addition to the branches of Beckett studies looking at the mind and cognitive processes on their own and in/for performance ... Beyond the field, it is a key publication for interdisciplinary research that puts performance and epistemology in dialogue, and it will also be of interest to theatre historians of modernism ... All in all, Little's monograph is yet another proof of the ground-breaking affordances of genetic criticism and digital humanities combined at the service of other disciplines and practices. * Digital Humanities Quarterly *



Book Information
ISBN 9781350269057
Author Dr James Little
Format Paperback
Page Count 520
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC