Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais

Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais - Paperback

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Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais
  • Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais
Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais - Paperback

Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais - Paperback

by Leo Bersani , Ulysse Dutoit
$93.60
$93.60

Book Overview

"How almost true they sometimes almost ring!" Samuel Beckett's character rues his words. "How wanting in inanity!" A person could almost understand them! Why taunt and flout us, as Beckett's writing does? Why discourage us from seeing, as Mark Rothko's paintings often can? Why immobilize and daze us, as Alain Resnais's films sometimes will? Why, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit ask, would three acknowledged masters of their media make work deliberately opaque and inhospitable to an audience? This book shows us how such crippling moves may signal a profoundly original--and profoundly anti-modernist--renunciation of art's authority.

Our culture, while paying little attention to art, puts great faith in its edifying and enlightening value. Yet Beckett's threadbare plays Company and Worstward Ho, so insistent on their poverty of meaning; Rothko's nearly monochromatic paintings in the Houston Chapel; Resnais's intensely self-contained, self-referential films Night and Fog and Muriel all seem to say, "I have little to show you, little to tell you, nothing to teach you." Bersani and Dutoit consider these works as acts of resistance; by inhibiting our movement toward them, they purposely frustrate our faith in art as a way of appropriating and ultimately mastering reality.

As this book demonstrates, these artists train us in new modes of mobility, which differ from the moves of an appropriating consciousness. As a form of cultural resistance, a rejection of a view of reality--both objects and human subjects--as simply there for the taking, this training may even give birth to a new kind of political power, one paradoxically consistent with the renunciation of authority. In its movement among these three artists, Arts of Impoverishment traces a new form of movement within art.

Back Jacket

Why taunt and flout us, as Beckett's writing does? Why discourage us from seeing, as Mark Rothko's paintings often can? Why immobilize and daze us, as Alain Resnais' films sometimes will? Why, Leo Becrsani and Ulysse Dutoit ask, would three acknowledged masters of their media make work deliberately opaque and inhospitable to an audience? This book shows us how such crippling moves may signal a profoundly original-and profoundly antimodernist-renunciation of art's authority.
ISBN9780674048768
Author Leo Bersani , Ulysse Dutoit
PublisherHarvard University Press
GenreArts and Literature
FormatPaperback
PublishedDecember 1993
LanguageENG- English
Pages256
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Art Literary Criticism Nonfiction Performing Arts

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More by Leo Bersani

Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais

Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais - Paperback

Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais - Paperback

By Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit

About Leo Bersani

Leo Bersani is professor emeritus of French at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Homos and coauthor, with Adam Phillips, of Intimacies, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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