Nicht-ich-identitat

Samuel Beckett's (1906-1989) works for theatre, radio, film and television may legitimately be regarded as so many scenic and acoustic experiments with recipients' perception conventions and attempts at identification. It is not the naturalistic delineation of reality that informs Beckett's plays and film and television scripts, but rather the aesthetic deconstruction of subjectivity. With reference to genre switches in Beckett's oeuvre and selected stagings/productions of his work, the study investigates Beckett's medium-specific handling of body and voice. These formal modules represent the basis for a form of aesthetic subjectivity exposed to the rival pulls of representation and being-perceived - in Beckett's plays, attempts at self-definition by a thinking or feeling 'self' are doomed to failure.