Beckett in New Orleans: Communities and Commodities

This article addresses the commodification of Waiting for Godot in community intervention theatre, with particular focus on Paul Chan’s 2007 production Waiting for Godot in New Orleans. It examines three forms of community that emerge in response to the project: artistic, social and local. By considering the ways in which the New Orleans Godot deploys these notions of community, it develops an argument for interpretive “thickness” in performing interventionist Godots, which, in turn, opens up new avenues for the debate between site-specific and traditional performances

The poetics of reciprocity in selected fictions by J. M. Coetzee

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 93-96).David Attwell, in the interview that prefaces "The Poetics of Reciprocity" section of Doubling the Point, identifies a recurrent concern with the function of reciprocity in the work of J. M Coetzee. 1 "The I-You relation ... connects with larger things in the whole of [Coetzee's] work, what I would like to call broadly the poetics of reciprocity." (Attwell 1992: 58) This dissertation seeks to examine the poetics of reciprocity as an aesthetic-ethical concern of Coetzee' s fiction. By establishing Coetzee's works as an extended critique of reciprocity in their thematic and structural elements, this dissertation presents a notion of reciprocity that acknowledges both an ethical imperative to engage with others and the aesthetic problems of depicting that ethical engagement in art. The aim of the dissertation is therefore to show the use of a poetics of reciprocity in raising and examining particular ethical and aesthetic issues in Coetzee' s work