Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T22:28:58.405Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Absorption and Theatricality

On Ghost Trio

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2022

Conor Carville
Affiliation:
University of Reading

Summary

Samuel Beckett's 1976 Television play Ghost Trio is one of his most beautiful and mysterious works. It is also the play that most clearly demonstrates Beckett's imaginative and aesthetic engagement with the visual arts and the history of painting in particular. Drawing on the work of Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried, On Ghost Trio demonstrates Beckett's exploration of the relationship between theatricality, absorption and objecthood, and shows how his work anticipates the development of video and installation art. In doing so Conor Carville develops a new and highly original reading of Beckett's art, rooted in both archival sources and philosophical aesthetics.
Get access
Type
Element
Information
Online ISBN: 9781009000369
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication: 17 March 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bazin, André (1967), What is Cinema? Vol. 1, Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Beckett, Samuel (1936–7), German Diaries, UoR MS, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading.Google Scholar
Beckett, Samuel (1965), Proust and Three Dialogues, London: Calder.Google Scholar
Beckett, Samuel (1976a), Ghost Trio, UoR MS1519/1, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading.Google Scholar
Beckett, Samuel (1976b), ‘Notes on Tryst’, UoR 1519/3, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading.Google Scholar
Beckett, Samuel (1979), The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, London: Picador.Google Scholar
Beckett, Samuel (1983), Disjecta; Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn, London: Calder.Google Scholar
Beckett, Samuel (1989), ‘First Love’, in The Expelled and Other Novellas, London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Beckett, Samuel (1990), The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber.Google Scholar
Beckett, Samuel (2009), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. 1: 1929–1940, ed. Fehsenfeld, Martha and Overbeck, Lois More, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Beckett, Samuel (2010), Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, 1950–1976, ed. Nixon, Mark, London: Faber and Faber.Google Scholar
Beckett, Samuel (2011), ‘The New Object’, Modernism/modernity, 18:4, pp. 878–80.Google Scholar
Caillois, Roger (2003), ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, in Frank, Claudine (ed.), The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 89107.Google Scholar
Carville, Conor (2018), Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cavell, Stanley (1976a), ‘Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Beckett’s Endgame’, in Must We Mean What We Say, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 115–62.Google Scholar
Cavell, Stanley (1976b), ‘The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear’, in Must We Mean What We Say, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 267356.Google Scholar
Cavell, Stanley (1979a), The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Scepticism, Morality and Tragedy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cavell, Stanley (1979b), The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Cohn, Ruby (2005), A Beckett Canon, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Fried, Michael (1988), Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Fried, Michael (1992), Courbet’s Realism, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Fried, Michael (1998), Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Fried, Michael (1999), Manet’s Modernism: Or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Fried, Michael (2008), Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Fried, Michael (2011), Four Honest Outlaws: Marioni, Ray, Sala, Gordon, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Clement (2002), ‘Modernist Painting’, in Harrison, Charles and Wood, Paul (eds.), Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 773–9.Google Scholar
Herren, Graley (2007), Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and TV, New York: Palgrave.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kleist, Heinrich von (1982), ‘On the Puppet Theatre’, in Miller, Philip B. (trans., ed., and introduction), An Abyss Deep Enough: Letters of Heinrich von Kleist with a Selection of Essays and Anecdotes, New York: Dutton, pp. 211–16.Google Scholar
Knowlson, James (2009), ‘Beckett and Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Art’, Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, 21, pp. 2744.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knowlson, James, and Pilling, John (1979), Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett, London: Calder.Google Scholar

Save element to Kindle

To save this element to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Absorption and Theatricality
Available formats
×

Save element to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Absorption and Theatricality
Available formats
×

Save element to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Absorption and Theatricality
Available formats
×