Reading and Writing Skills for Students of Literature in English:

Postwar; Postmodern; Postcolonial

Enric Monforte

Jacqueline Hurtley

Bill Phillips

Samuel Beckett

Breath (1969)

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)

http://www.pencatala.cat

http://www.umbc.edu

Some of Beckett’s plays

• Eleutheria (first play) (1947)• En attendant Godot premiered in Paris (1953)• Fin de Partie (1957)• Krapp’s Last Tape (1958)• Happy Days (1961)• Play (1964)• Breath (1969) • Not I (1973)

Some of Beckett’s plays

• That Time and Footfalls (1976)• A Piece of Monologue (1979)• Rockaby and Ohio Impromptu (1981)• Catastrophe (1982)• What Where (1983)

Some of Beckett’s prose works

• More Pricks than Kicks (1934)

• Murphy (1938)

• Molloy, Malone meurt, L’innomable (1951)

• Mercier et Camier (1973)

Nobel Prize for

Literature (1969)

‘Mix a powerful imagination with a logic in absurdum, and the result

will be either a paradox or an Irishman. If it is an Irishman, you will

get the paradox into the bargain. Even the Nobel Prize in Literature

is sometimes divided. Paradoxically, this has happened in 1969, a single

award being addressed to one man, two languages and a third nation,

itself divided.’

Presentation speech by Karl Ragnar Gierow, of the Swedish Academy

http://www.nobelprize.org

Breath

• 'Breath' was written in response to Kenneth Tynan's request for a piece for his show Oh! Calcutta! at New York's Eden Theatre on 16 June 1969. It lasts less than a minute

• The text was originally published in 'Gambit', Vol. 4, No. 16 (1970). At the time, it was considered as the culmination of Beckett's work

Breath

The setting for Breath - a Channel 4 production (dir. Damien Hirst, 2000)

http://www.channel4.com/learning/main/netnotes/programid1681.htm

http://www.channel4.com/learning/main/netnotes/sectionid100664702.htm

The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don't want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him. He's not f---ing me about, he's not leading me up any garden path, he's not slipping me a wink, he's not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he's not selling me anything I don't want to buy — he doesn't give a bollock whether I buy or not — he hasn't got his hand over his heart. Well, I'll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty. His work is beautiful.

Harold Pinter

Beckett’s grave in Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris

http://www.themodernword.com/Beckett/sb_grave.html