Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Residual Figuration in Samuel Beckett and Alberto Giacometti

Residual Figuration in Samuel Beckett and Alberto Giacometti

Li, Lin

Paperback

Series: Studies in Comparative Literature, Book 53

Literary CriticismSculpture & Installation

ISBN10: 1781886660
ISBN13: 9781781886663
Publisher: Legenda
Published: Jun 16 2025
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.48
Height: 0.27 Width: 6.69 Depth: 9.61
Language: English

In 1945, Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) brought back to Paris six matchboxes filled with the work of his war years: minute figurines that crumbled upon a single touch. Around this time, Irish playwright Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) began writing plays, first Eleutheria and then Waiting for Godot. When they came together in 1961 to collaborate on a re-staging of Godot, both had turned their attention to different types of figures: Giacometti to lanky, attenuated figures that seem to erode into their environment, and Beckett to increasingly disembodied characters, such as Henry and Ada in Embers. What can we make of this turn in depicting figures that seem to make and unmake themselves in our processes of perceiving them? Through a close examination of Beckett's dramatic works and Giacometti's art, Lin Li traces the development of this peculiar type of figuration and uncovers its implications on personhood, rhetoric and inter-medial reading.

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