Beckett's dying words / Christopher Ricks

Ricks, Christopher (1933-)

ISBN 10: 0198123582 / ISBN 13: 9780198123583

Published by Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1993

About this Item

Near fine cloth copy in a good if somewhat edge-nicked and dust-dulled dust wrapper, now mylar-sleeved. Remains particularly well-preserved overall; tight, bright, clean and strong. Physical description: vi, 218 p.; 21 cm. Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: Death. The wish to die. Death as ease. Positive annihilation. Never dying. Certified death -- Words That Went Dead. Abstracted to death. Cliches. Resurrection. The obituary -- Languages, Both Dead and Living. Memento mori. Gaelic. De rigueur. Archaism and the moribund. The antithetical sense. The counter-poison -- The Irish Bull. Definitions. The bull and blasphemy. The bull and death. The bull, identity, and posterity. Coleridge and the bull. Sydney Smith and the Irish. Some bulls from Beckett. The bull and power -- Postscript: December 1989 -- A Selective Chronology of Beckett's Published Volumes. Subjects: Beckett, Samuel 1906-1989 Criticism and interpretation. Beckett, Samuel 1906-. Death in literature. Mortality in literature. French drama 20th century History and criticism. French literature. Genre: Bibliography. Criticism, interpretation, etc. 1 Kg.

Seller Inventory # 337377

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Beckett's dying words / Christopher Ricks
• Publisher: Oxford : Oxford University Press
• Publication Date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0198123582
• ISBN 13: 9780198123583
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: Reprint.
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Weight: 1 kilogram

About this title

Synopsis

Most people want to live forever. But there is another truth: the longing for oblivion. With pain, wit, and humor, the art of Samuel Beckett variously embodies this truth, this ancient enduring belief that it is better to be dead than alive, best of all never to have been born. Beckett is the supreme writer of an age which has created new possibilities and impossibilities even in the matter of death and its definition--an age of transplants and life-support.
But how does a writer give life to dismay at life itself, to the not unwelcome encroachments of death, when it is for the life, the vitality of their language that we value writers? Beckett became himself as a writer when he realized in his very words a principle of death: in clichés, which are dead but won't lie down; in a dead language and its memento mori; in words which mean their own opposites, like cleaving; and in what Beckett called a syntax of weakness.
This artful study explores the relation between deep convictions about life or death and the incarnations which these take in the exact turns of a great writer, the realizations of an Irishman who wrote in English and in French, two languages with different apprehensions of life and of death.

From the Back Cover

This book explores the relation between deep convictions about life or death and the incarnations which these take in the exact turns of a great writer-the realizations of an Irishman who wrote in English and in French, two languages with different apprehensions of life and of death.