Beckett, Barthes and Breath
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4747516 |
|---|---|
| Authors | A Rose (0000-0003-0817-6898, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 218-232 |
| Publication date | 2022-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Paragraph (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0264-8334 • E-ISSN: 1750-0176 |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3366/para.2022.0398 |
| OpenAlex | W4284687168 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 1 |
This essay develops a tense relation between Samuel Beckett and Roland Barthes over their treatment of breath. If Barthes's lovers come together through a shared breath, breaths pull Beckett's couples apart. How then might breath bring Beckett and Barthes together, so they might be close but not too close? The essay first discards the idea of using a single understanding of breath by showing how the localized instances of breath in Beckett and Barthes do not scale up to a coherent, synthetic concept. Then, by turning to works that play with the problems of metanarrative, Beckett's How It Is (1961-4) and Barthes's A Lover's Discourse (1977-8), it shows how breath becomes a possible means of reading these two texts together
Aesthetics · Art · Linguistics · Literature · Metanarrative · Narrative · Reading (process · Relation (database · Computer Science · Kierkegaardian Philosophy and Influence · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Samuel Beckett and Modernism
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |