“Resurrecting ‘Echo’s Bones.’” Rev. of Echo’s Bones. Samuel Beckett. Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies. 23 October 2014. (original) (raw)

“Echo's Bones": Samuel Beckett's Lost Story of Afterlife

Journal of the Short Story in English. Les Cahiers …, 2009

More Pricks than Kicks (1934), le premier livre de fiction publié par Samuel Beckett, a attiré l'attention des chercheurs presque dès sa parution. Les raisons ne manquent pas puisque le livre nous propose, en dix chapitres, un parcours pour la vie de Belacqua Shuah, le ...

‘Asylum under my tread’: Silences and Voices in Samuel Beckett’s Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates

Verbeia, 2020

When discussing Samuel Beckett’s poetry, critics have noted the author’s pursuit of his self-expression beyond the boundaries of language and time. However, his early poetry has never been fully incorporated into general analysis of his poetic production. The aim of this essay is to offer a different viewpoint from which to consider Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates (1935), Beckett’s first collection of poems, in close connection with the potential meaning of the term ‘facultatif’, used by the author himself in a letter to his friend Thomas McGreevy to describe this poetry. My contention is that Beckett’s early poetry was for him a sheltered space of self-expression and liberation, where he could most easily describe his innermost thoughts. In this respect, “Echo’s Bones” will be ultimately considered as a key point at which to attempt a general definition of Beckett’s poetics.

“On This Haunted Ground I Was Lost and Found“ – Echo’s Litography

2016

Ovid's work represents Echo in turning from bodily to bodiless shape, from the talkative voice to the surplus of voicelessness. Being punished to repeat the end of the sentences of the speaking-other, Echo is the ultimate figure of metamorphosis and of wandering-always lost in repetitions, always lost to be found in écriture in stone, in engraved narratives of the other, as a ghostly identity of the other. Therefore, Echo is a decentred, meandering voice-a voice only until there is any voice at all. Being the undercurrent of speech, Echo is a figure of fragmented, dismembered, detached speach, a travelling postcard on an errant, wandering course. The mythical Echo creates a sonorous ground to be written upon, only to be multiplied. Belonging to nobody , she is always on her way to die away and close, a voice-thing destabilizing the voice-subject. This research paper deals with the mythic figure of Echo in terms of Gayatri's notion of "deconstructive embrace" and the concept of the subaltern. Can Echo's "fragile auricle" be aligned to "non-mimetical" identity, to multiplicities of repetitions in conflict to the voice-subject, the same and the different at once? Or, if Echo "has no identity proper to itself", as Spivak puts it, what can be lost and found in echoland of identity, in the political space of "the catachresis of response as such"?

“His heart against his ribs”: Embodied Tension in “The Dead”

ABEI Journal

This article focuses upon the interplay between the verbal and the non-verbal, cognitive and embodied meaning, as it is rendered in James Joyce's "The Dead." It suggests that one of the subjects enacted in the story is the extent to which dissociation pervades social structures and cognitive frameworks, considers how this is played out in the protagonist's predicament as lover and literary critic, and discusses its implications for the reader's aesthetic experience of, and response to, the story. Finally, it argues that "The Dead" enacts the desire and failure to control the unpredictable, in life, love and art, and submits that its aesthetic power resides in making us experience both our desire for meaning and the potential failure of our effort to make sense of what we, like Gabriel Conroy, "cannot apprehend.

Movements in the Hollow Coffin: On “The Fall of the House of Usher”

Poe Studies, 2012

On "The Fall of the House of Usher" MARK STEVEN A n irrational belief that the dead may return to haunt the living is part of "the uncanny," a psychical phenomenon whose theory Sigmund Freud adapts (from Ernst Jentsch) to describe "the perceptible reanimation of something familiar that has been repressed." "The writer," Freud argues, brings us "in relation to spirits, demons, and ghosts" by "not letting us know whether he is taking us into the real world or into a purely fantastic one of his own creation." 1 If psychoanalytic theory holds that literature is manifestly a haunted medium, then perhaps a productive intersection could be staged between Freud's uncanny and Jacques Derrida's "hauntology"between psychical phenomena and a critical program that "supplants its nearhomonym ontology, replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive." 2 The literary figure of this conjunction would best be described as "undead"-and, by reading an exemplarily haunted work of literature with these two theories in mind, I want to propose some ideas for what I am going to call "the undeath of the author." To begin with a concession: Edgar Allan Poe is done to death. While the flesh-and-blood Poe met his physical end over 160 years ago-done in by either alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, or tuberculosis-similarly myriad scholars have dissected his literary corpus with all the critical tools provided them, and by doing so they have turned out a variety of different Poes. Scott Peeples describes a handful in the preface to his indispensible Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe (2004): "the romantic Southern outcast, the patron saint of the French symbolists, the hack, the test case for Freudian psychoanlysis, the proto-deconstructionist, the racist, the antiracist, and so on." 3 Achieving metaphorical quintessence, then, a profusion of that scholarship has been deeply indebted to Roland Barthes's seminal essay "Death of the Author" (1967). Within this context, the most famous work to be influenced by Barthes-Joseph Riddel's 1979 essay "The 'Crypt' of Edgar Poe"-argues that, in Poe's tales, "images of nature are already metonymic substitutions for words-or substitutions for substitutions," and that Poe's "realm of dreams" is in fact the "realm of language." 4 It is thus that Poe has