WL Introduction

Introduction From WITTGENSTEIN’S LADDER: POETIC LANGUAGE AND THE STRANGENESS OF THE ORDINARY University of Chicago Press, Copyright © 1996 by The University of Chicago Marjorie Perloff –Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel –Philosophy ought [...]

Beckett letters

THE LETTERS OF SAMUEL BECKETT, Vol. I: 1929-1940 EDITED BY MARTHA DOW FEHSENFELD and LOIS MORE OVERBECK Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xcix + 782 pp. $50 cloth. Marjorie Perloff In literary annals, 2009 may well go down as the year that saw the publication, not of this or that novel, set of poems, or “important” [...]

Beckett’s Yeatsian Turn

“An Image from a Past Life”:

Beckett’s Yeatsian Turn

Published in Fulcrum, No. 6, 2007

–Reciting from Yeats’s “Friends,” in coming to the lines

While up from my heart’s root

So great a sweetness flows

I shake from head to foot,

Sam would stand up and repeat them, saying “Imagine such feeling—“So great a sweetness flows / […]

Waiting

Published by American Conservatory Theory, October 2003

Jan Kott: “We do [Brecht] when we want Fantasy. When we want
Realism, we do ‘Waiting for Godot’.”

What can the great Polish dramaturge have meant by this seemingly perverse statement? One usually thinks of Brecht’s political theatre, with its topical plots, Marxist themes and historical characters like Galileo or Hitler (Arturo Ui) as “realistic,” whereas Beckett’s “circus” play in which […]

The Beckett/ Feldman Radio Collaboration

Words and Music as Hörspiel

Published in The Beckett Circle 26, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 207-11.

Beckett’s third radio play, Words and Music, written for BBC Radio and broadcast in November 1962, presents a curious anomaly in the Beckett canon, for a good portion of this radio play is given over to a musical score, to be written by a collaborator. For its first […]

The Silence That Is Not Silence Acoustic Art In Samuel Beckett’s Embers

published in Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media (New York and London: Garland, 1999), pp. 247-68.

–The primary purpose of radio is to convey information from one place to another through the intervening media (i.e. air space, nonconducting materials) without wires.
–New Columbia Encyclopedia

– Thesis: The phonograph […]

In Love with Hiding Samuel Beckett’s War

published in Iowa Review, 35, no. 2 (2005): 76-103.

Vire will wind in other shadows

unborn through the bright ways tremble

and the old mind ghost-forsaken

sink into its havoc.

-Samuel Beckett
[…]

Dance of the Intellect

Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy