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INTRODUCTION raise awareness of the importance of Beckett in education; and finally, it led to the publication of this book, which sets contributions from France, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom in vibrant conversation. Part 1, "Influencing Beckett, examines some aesthetic, philosophical, and theoretical influences found in Becketts works. Art often stimulates philosophy and philosophy art. Teresa Rosell Nicolás, in her essay "In Search of Lost Image” that compares Beckett with Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, contends that both writers’ anti-conceptual, anti-intellectual idea of art is from Schopenhauer’s thought, but in Krapp’s Last Tape, Beckett subverts the Proustian treatment of an artist and reconfigures the concept related to the involuntary memory that Beckett explores in his early essay Proust. Laurens De Vos’s paper “The Theatricalization of Endgame as the Painterly World of Bram and Geer van Velde: Changing Perspectives in the Poetics of Cubism and Sartre’s Phenomenology” traces the notion that Endgame could be read as a play about Bram and Geer van Velde’s work and as a painting itself. He also attends to strong resemblances to the aesthetics of cubism in the play, which is shared with Jean-Paul Sartre, whose perception structuring his theoretical world is related to a cubist aesthetics. Patrick Armstrong, finding strong influences of Eastern philosophy on Beckett, gives us a new insight in reading his later plays, especially That Time. “Samuel Beckett and the Sinic World” demonstrates the Sinic dimension of Beckett’s work, arguing that Beckett was intrigued by Eastern philosophy through his early reading of Schopenhauer and other books on ancient Chinese civilization. Beckett’s fascination with Sinic culture is shown by the fact that he even refers to Lao-Tzu in the margin of the fourth draft of That Time. Part 2, “Beckett Influencing,” shows how Beckett challenges accepted ideas and values in a revolutionary way, as well as how his writing has an impact on his contemporaries and successors. Jonathan Bignell’s essay “Random dottiness”: Samuel Beckett and the Reception of Harold Pinter’s Early Dramas” analyzes the significance of the rejection of Beckett and Pinter in the late 1950s and early 1960s British drama scenes, and their revolutionary roles in changing the meanings of their “brands” through the medium of British radio with the support of Martin Esslin, BBC Head of Drama, and Donald McWhinnie, the BBC Third Programme producer. Today’s success of Caryl Churchill, another British playwright, also owes much to them, for her career started from radio scriptwriting. Mariko Hori Tanaka’s paper “Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in Caryl Churchill’s Later Plays” discusses how Churchill’s later dramas such as Here We Go and Escaped Alone are reminiscent of Beckett’s plays that describe the vulnerability of being human almost satirically with typically fragmented language, dealing with characters who suffer not only from post-catastrophic trauma but also from
