Book Description

The author defines and analyzes the new type of theatricalperspective invented by Samuel Beckett. She begins with an overview of thechanges of the definition of twentieth century-knowledge (e.g, art, science,philosophy, and psychology) then discusses the concepts of time, space, andmovement which underlie Beckett's notion and use of perspective in the theater.The Broken Window shows how Beckett translates a number of twentieth-centuryesthetic and philosophical concerns - the impossibility of separating subjectand object, the indeterminacy of time and space, the inevitability of movementand change - into specific dramatic techniques and traces their evolutionthrough close textual analyses of six plays. Hale is the first critic to define Beckett's theatricaltechniques in terms of the notion of perspective and to link them to similarinnovations in the plastic arts. In addition, no critic has so exhaustivelyelaborated Beckett's premises of indeterminacy, the inevitability ofperception, and the breakdown of the subject/object relationship.