Staging Beckettian Minds: Umwelt and Cartesian Stage Space in Beckett's Plays
The result's identifiers
Result code in IS VaVaI
<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11210%2F21%3A10457480" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11210/21:10457480 - isvavai.cz</a>
Result on the web
<a href="https://verso.is.cuni.cz/pub/verso.fpl?fname=obd_publikace_handle&handle=oKnEw8TX78" target="_blank" >https://verso.is.cuni.cz/pub/verso.fpl?fname=obd_publikace_handle&handle=oKnEw8TX78</a>
DOI - Digital Object Identifier
<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1969559" target="_blank" >10.1080/10486801.2021.1969559</a>
Alternative languages
Result language
angličtina
Original language name
Staging Beckettian Minds: Umwelt and Cartesian Stage Space in Beckett's Plays
Original language description
While working on his production of Endgame in the Schiller-Theater in 1967, Beckett outlined his view of theatre work to his production assistant Michael Haerdter: 'One turns out a small world with its own laws, conducts the action as if upon a chessboard'. Drawing on biologist Jacob von Uexkiill's concept of Umwelt as 'an organism's model of the world', the present article outlines the characteristic creative environment of Beckett's theatre by investigating the role of the proscenium stage space as the 'chessboard' in shaping Beckettian fictional minds. In most cases, the Umwelt enacted onstage is reduced to a bare minimum and increasingly defies the neat Cartesian mind-world dualism in favour of a continuous and constitutive interaction between the mind and its (fictional) environment. In choosing to pursue and foreground this mingling between mind and world, Beckett may have presaged a number of recent developments in philosophy and cognitive science that reject the Cartesian (representational) model of cognition and likewise build on the notion of Umwelt as the basis for all cognitive activity. The present article argues that Beckett's late plays both exploit and undermine the carefully crafted 'small world' of the performance afforded by the proscenium stage space by introducing the trope of a disembodied voice, a crucial element in his work for radio and a recurring feature in his prose texts from the 1950s onwards.
Czech name
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Czech description
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Classification
Type
J<sub>imp</sub> - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database
CEP classification
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OECD FORD branch
60205 - Literary theory
Result continuities
Project
<a href="/en/project/EF16_019%2F0000734" target="_blank" >EF16_019/0000734: Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World</a><br>
Continuities
P - Projekt vyzkumu a vyvoje financovany z verejnych zdroju (s odkazem do CEP)
Others
Publication year
2021
Confidentiality
S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů
Data specific for result type
Name of the periodical
Contemporary Theatre Review
ISSN
1048-6801
e-ISSN
1477-2264
Volume of the periodical
31
Issue of the periodical within the volume
4
Country of publishing house
GB - UNITED KINGDOM
Number of pages
17
Pages from-to
438-454
UT code for WoS article
000746705800006
EID of the result in the Scopus database
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