Absorption and Theatricality
On Ghost Trio

The 1976 Television play Ghost Trio demonstrates Beckett's exploration of the relationship between theatricality, absorption and objecthood.

Conor Carville (Author)

9781009001175, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 17 March 2022

75 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 0.4 cm, 0.114 kg

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.

1. Introduction
2. Modernism, Painting, Tragedy
3. 'Good Evening'
4. The Fact of Separateness: Beckett and Scepticism
5. To-be-Seenness: Fried and Film
6. Resorting to Rectangles
7. 'He Will Now Think He Hears Her'
8. Objects of a Special Gaze
9. The Face of the Father
10. The Ghost
11. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]