Voices of suffering and hope: The world of childhood terror and loss in the plays of Samuel Beckett.
Item
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Title
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Voices of suffering and hope: The world of childhood terror and loss in the plays of Samuel Beckett.
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Identifier
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AAI9304633
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identifier
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9304633
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Creator
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Bell, Andrea Gaye.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Felicia Bonaparte
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Date
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1992
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Modern | Psychology, General | Theater | Literature, Romance
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Abstract
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Samuel Beckett has been widely acknowledged as a voice of our age. One of this century's most influential writers, Beckett fashioned a theatre which altered the course of contemporary drama as radically as his prose transformed the conventions and direction of post-war fiction. The voices, images, and settings which we have come to recognize as distinctly Beckettian continue to haunt the modern imagination.;Beckett's stark dramatic landscapes and unconventional stage images, which had initially baffled and even outraged many audiences, have long since been recognized as archetypal and highly evocative representations of the plight of humanity in the post-war era. Beckett's characters are among the most notable literary achievements of this century; their solitary voices, once thought to be inhuman cries at odds with dramatic convention, are now regarded as profoundly moving expressions of human suffering and hope.;This study represents the conclusions I have drawn using a psychological approach to Beckett's plays (and drawing from such figures as Alice Miller and from the English and American Object-relations theorists as well as from Kristeva and the French feminists) following a hunch I had a few years ago about Beckett's plays--that a primary reason for their profound and widespread power and appeal lies in the expression they give to voices of childhood experience and, in particular, to experiences of childhood trauma, terror, loss, and hope. Through Beckett's precise use of movement and gesture his plays even capture buried memories of pre-verbal experience. Beckett's radically unconventional stage images and their symbolic psychic geography exert a powerful grip on audiences; their uncanny effect is to evoke feelings which seem at once both utterly strange and bizarre and, at the same time, terribly familiar and known. Thus with Beckett theatre once again becomes a communal experience, as audiences collectively participate in the dramatic re-enactment of buried memories of childhood pain. Beckett's theatre "breaks the silence" and secrecy surrounding the tragic conditions of childhood in our age and shows how acutely adults suffer from their sealed-off memories of childhood terror and loss.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
