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Book Reviews JUNE SCHLUETER and ENOCH BRATER, eds. Approaches to Teaching Beckett's "Waiting for Godar". Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series #34. New York: The Modern Language Association of America 1991. Pp. 184. $34.00. $19.00 (PS) I have been teaching Waiting for Gadal every year for thirty years. When I began, in 1964. the play was fairly new. How would I teach it? "Meet with friends and read the play together," I suggested. I knew that the humour, and the effect of the silences, would come across that way. Students didn't know what to make of the play, when they read it from the printed page. Each year I find something in Godal I haven', noticed before, and continue to experiment with methods of working with the play in the classroom. Jane Schlueter and Enoch Brater's splendid collection of teachers' approaches to Godor enlarged my perceptions of the play. The volume should be a part of every instructor's library. But it should not be a secret manual for teachers only. This work, in the hands of students, will make immediately apparent the mullitudinous ways of looking at Godor: its particular genre, its relation to ontologies, its imagery (biblical and otherwise), its debt to everything from ancient tragedy to film and music hall gags, its vitality as physical theatre "not as abstruse fable, but as an enact· ment" (Garner, 147). Like Stanton B. Gamer, Toby Silverman Zinman"advocates a hands·on approach ("Teaching Godar through Set and Poster Design"): "It seems foolish if not traitorous to Beckett'S astonishing revision of the theatre, the revolu· tion that was Waiting fo" Godar, to teach that playas if it were a scholarly exercise in allusion.getting" (151). Schlueter and Brater have assembled a stellar cast of critics and teachers. An addi· tion to those already mentioned. the reader is privileged 10 the views of Ruby Cohn, Martin Esslin, Lance St. John Butler, S.E. Gontarski, and many others. The volume is "Twenty·three Ways of Looking at a Play," a finely prismatic collection. Despite the variety. contributors share a respect for their students (Katherine Burkman quotes from 682 Book Reviews a student's paper [86], and Zinman describes slUdents' artistic designs [150-55]). As well. it hardly need be said that all contributors have in common a love of Beckett's play. A central focus to this vast and varied assembly is recognilion of the paradoxes in Godol (and in the rest of Beckett's work). Stephen Barker's allusion to Camus' The Myrh ofSisyphus sums up the dichotomy in CodOI (a dilemma which other conlributors approach in different ways): "the absurd is precisely the suspense and tension, the abyss. in the hUman being. instigal'ed by the arbitrary irrationality of the world and the rage for order in the mind" ( I 19). (See also Gamer [1431.) Contributors also seem to agree that an heuristic approach is the most helpful for "teaching" Gadal. As students are encouraged to explore and learn for themselves, they discover that the play is "as Vladimir describes himself and Estragon - 'inexhaustible '" (Schlueter, 17). When the student perceives that no single critical view can explain Gadot, slhe realizes that the limitations and failures of criticism run parallel 10 Beckett's words and art: "to be an artist is to fail as no other dare fail" (110, 155). In this volume, criticism superbly mirrors BeckeLt's own humane recreation of our striving , failure, and renewal. PATRICIA HOWARD, UNIVERSITY QFTORONTO J. ELLEN GAINOR. Shaw's Daughters: Dramatic' and Narrative COllstructions a/Gender. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1991. Pp. 282, iIIuslrated. $32.5°. Shaw's DUI/glllet's raises the important question of why Shaw was ever considered a feminist. Based on the harsh reviews it has received among Shaw critics, the book must be seen as successfully upsetting assumptions that have been passed for years to students and thealer-goers. While Shaw has generally been touted as the exceptional Victorian -Edwardian man who believed in women's equality, Gainor proves that, as he himself stated, Shaw was incapable of portraying a woman on stage who was not in some measure himself. In other...

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