Boulter Jonathan Boulter's Books

Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed

By: Jonathan Boulter

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed

By: Jonathan Boulter

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) is one of the most important twentieth century writers. Seen as both a modernist and postmodernist, his work has influenced generations of playwrights, novelists and poets. Despite his notorious difficulty, Beckett famously refused to offer his readers any help in interpreting his work. Beckett's texts examine key philosophical-humanist questions but his writing is challenging, perplexing and often intimidating for readers. This guide offers students reading Beckett a clear starting point from which to confront some of the most difficult plays and novels produced in the twentieth century, texts which often appear to work on the very edge of meaninglessness. Beginning with a general introduction to Beckett, his work and its contexts, the guide looks at each of the major genres in turn, analyzing key works chronologically. It explains why Beckett's texts can seem so impenetrable and confusing, and focuses on key questions and issues. Giving an accessible account of both the form and content of Beckett's work, this guide will enable students to begin to come to grips with this fascinating but daunting writer.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

196

Publisher

A&C Black

Published Date

ISBN 10

1441125981

ISBN 13

9781441125989

Melancholy and the Archive

Trauma, History and Memory in the Contemporary Novel

By: Jonathan Boulter

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Melancholy and the Archive

Trauma, History and Memory in the Contemporary Novel

By: Jonathan Boulter

Melancholy and the Archive examines how trauma, history and memory are represented in key works of major contemporary writers such as David Mitchell, Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami and Jose Saramago. The book explores how these authors construct crucial relationships between sites of memory-the archive becomes a central trope here-and the self that has been subjected to various traumas, various losses. The archive-be it a bureaucratic office (Saramago), an underground bunker (Auster), a geographical space or landscape (Mitchell) or even a hole (Murakami)-becomes the means by which the self attempts to preserve and conserve his or her sense of history even as the economy of trauma threatens to erase the grounds of such preservation: as the subject or self is threatened so the archive becomes a festishized site wherein history is housed, accommodated, created, even fabricated. The archive, in Freudian terms, becomes a space of melancholy precisely as the subject preserves not only a personal history or a culture's history, but also the history of the traumas that necessitates the creation of the archive as such.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

225

Publisher

A&C Black

Published Date

ISBN 10

1441152164

ISBN 13

9781441152169

Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed

By: Jonathan Boulter

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed

By: Jonathan Boulter

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

255

Publisher

A&C Black

Published Date

ISBN 10

1441180966

ISBN 13

9781441180964

Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett's Short Prose

By: Jonathan Boulter

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett's Short Prose

By: Jonathan Boulter

Jonathan Boulter offers the reader a way of understanding Beckett's presentation of the human, more precisely, posthuman, subject in his short prose.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

232

Publisher

Edinburgh University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1474430279

ISBN 13

9781474430272

Melancholy and the Archive

Trauma, History and Memory in the Contemporary Novel

By: Jonathan Boulter

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Melancholy and the Archive

Trauma, History and Memory in the Contemporary Novel

By: Jonathan Boulter

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

225

Publisher

A&C Black

Published Date

ISBN 10

1441152164

ISBN 13

9781441152169

Parables of the Posthuman

Digital Realities, Gaming, and the Player Experience

By: 19122 PA

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Parables of the Posthuman

Digital Realities, Gaming, and the Player Experience

By: 19122 PA

A philosophical reading of video gaming that focuses on what it means to be a player. In its intimate joining of self and machine, video gaming works to extend the body into a fluid, dynamic, unstable, and discontinuous entity. While digital gaming and culture has become a popular field of academic study, there has been a lack of sustained philosophical analysis of this direct gaming experience. In Parables of the Posthuman: Digital Realities, Gaming, and the Player Experience, author Jonathan Boulter addresses this gap by analyzing video games and the player experience philosophically. Finding points of departure in phenomenology and psychoanalysis, Boulter argues that we need to think seriously about what it means to enter into a relationship with the game machine and to assume (or to have conferred upon you) a machinic, posthuman identity. Parables of the Posthumanapproaches the experience of gaming by asking: What does it mean for the player to enter the machinic "world" of the game? What forms of subjectivity does the game offer to the player? What happens to consciousness itself when one plays? To this end, Boulter analyzes the experience of particular role-playing video games, includingFallout 3, Half-Life 2, BioShock, Crysis 2, and Metal Gear Solid 4. These games both thematize the idea of the posthuman—the games are "about" subjects whose physical and intellectual capacities are extended through machine or other prosthetic means—and also enact an experience of the posthuman for the player, who becomes more than what he was as he plays the game. Boulter concludes by exploring how the game acts as a parable of what the human, or posthuman, may look like in times to come. Academics with an interest in the intersection of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and popular culture forms and video gamers with an interest in thinking about the implications of gaming will enjoy this volume.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

163

Publisher

Wayne State University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0814341446

ISBN 13

9780814341445

Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of Samuel Beckett

By: Jonathan Boulter

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of Samuel Beckett

By: Jonathan Boulter

Avoiding the pitfalls of the modernist/postmodernist controversy, Boulter goes beyond formalism to situate Beckett's early and mid-career novels on the horizon of understanding. Hermeneutics is brought to bear on Beckett's work in original and previously neglected ways."--Lois Oppenheim, author of The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett's Dialogue with Art Jonathan Boulter's study argues that Samuel Beckett's novels not only thematize the reading process but in various ways are "about" the reader and the process of interpretation, or hermeneutics, as well. Building on seminal work by H. Porter Abbott and others whose first premises have been largely passed over by the Beckett critical community, he reads the early to middle novels of Beckett (Watt; Mercier and Camier; Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable; and How It Is) in the light of phenomenological-hermeneutical theory, primarily that of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Boulter demonstrates how Beckett's novels illustrate and examine issues central to philosophical hermeneutics: the notion that the self inhabits or is inhabited by a linguistic world, that one must understand one's condition through language, that the self is ultimately at a distance from itself because it is mediated by language. Boulter reveals that Beckett's texts are inhabited by narrators and characters who are allegorized versions of the actual reader. Adapting such concepts as Gadamer's "conversation" and "phronesis" and Ricoeur's "appropriation," Boulter works through the major novels showing how each is, in turn, a stage of Beckett's development of the subject. From an exploration of the relation between the title character's failing language and the obligations of the reader in the face of an unreadable discourse in Watt to an explication of a generalized thematization of the hermeneutics of being in How It Is, Boulter charts a middle course between the allegorical and textual extremes of contemporary Beckett criticism. He shows that these novels, in short, are about the philosophical-hermeneutical grounds of understanding, a theme that has received scant attention in Beckett criticism. Beyond his account of the novels, Boulter offers a concluding chapter that points the way to a fruitful hermeneutical analysis of Beckett's drama and later prose (Endgame, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho). Jonathan Boulter is assistant professor of English at Saint Francis Xavier University and has contributed articles to Samuel Beckett: A Casebook, Literature Interpretation Theory, and Cultural Critique, among other publications.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

158

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813021065

ISBN 13

9780813021065

The Boulter Letters

By: Hugh Boulter

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Boulter Letters

By: Hugh Boulter

Originally published in 1769-70, the Boulter letters represent one of the most important printed sources for the political and ecclesiastical history of Ireland in the early Hanoverian period. Following his appointment as archbishop of Armagh and primate of the Church of Ireland in 1724, Hugh Boulter quickly established himself as a central figure in the government of Ireland and the foremost upholder of the 'English interest' in Ireland until his death in 1744. This collection reproduces for the first time the originally published correspondence in its entirety, includes previously unpublished letters written by and to Boulter, and contains an extensive introduction to the collection. Taken together, this reprinted, expanded edition offers a fascinating insight into the political and ecclesiastical history of Ireland in the first half of the 18th century. [Subject: 18th-Century History, Political & Ecclesiastical History, Church of Ireland, Armagh, Irish Studies, Ireland]

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

N/A

Published Date

ISBN 10

1846822904

ISBN 13

9781846822902

Book's by Boulter Jonathan Boulter

Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed

Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed

Melancholy and the Archive

Melancholy and the Archive

Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed

Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed

Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett's Short Prose

Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett's Short Prose

Melancholy and the Archive

Melancholy and the Archive

Parables of the Posthuman

Parables of the Posthuman

Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of Samuel Beckett

Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of Samuel Beckett

The Boulter Letters

The Boulter Letters

Username

Password

Username

Password

Password again

Birthday

Email