Samuel Beckett And The Prosthetic Body

This book studies the representation of the body in Beckett's work, focusing on the 'prosthetic' aspect of the organs and senses. While making use of the theoretical potential of the concept of 'prosthesis', it aims to resituate Beckett in the broad cultural context of modernism in which the impact of new media and technologies was registered.

From the contents: Beckett and the quest for meaning (Martin Esslin). - Beckett's tonic laughter (Manfred Pfister). - The magic triangle: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Arno Schmidt (Friedhelm Rathjen). - Beckett performed in Italy (Annamaria Cascetta). - Beckett and synaesthesia (Yoshiki Tajiri). - Beckett versus the reader (Michael Guest).

Samuel Beckett's work is deeply concerned with physical contact - remembered, half-remembered, or imagined. Applying the philosophical writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Merleau-Ponty that feature sensation, this study examines how Beckett's later work dramatizes moments of contact between self and self, self and world, and self and other.

This book develops a new theoretical account of the historical role of the novel in fashioning our bodies and environments.

This book considers how Samuel Beckett’s critical essays, dialogues and reflections drew together longstanding philosophical discourses about the nature of representation, and fostered crucial, yet overlooked, connections between these discourses and his fiction and poetry. It also pays attention to Beckett’s writing for little-magazines in France from the 1930s to the 1950s, before going on to consider how the style of Beckett’s late prose recalls and develops figures and themes in his critical writing. By providing a long-overdue assessment of Beckett’s work as a critic, this study shows how Beckett developed a new aesthetic in knowing dialogue with ideas including phenomenology, Kandinsky’s theories of abstraction, and avant-garde movements such as Surrealism. This book will be illuminating for students and researchers interested not just in Beckett, but in literary modernism, the avant-garde, European visual culture and philosophy.

A reading of the philosophical idea of world as it relates to the posthuman subject in Beckett's short proseJonathan Boulter offers the reader a way of understanding Beckett's presentation of the human, more precisely, posthuman, subject in his short prose. These texts are notoriously difficult yet utterly compelling. This compelling difficulty arises from Beckett's radical dismantling of the idea of the human. His short texts offer instead an image of a being who may be posthumous, or ultimately beyond categories of life and death. And yet, despite this dismantling, the narrators of these texts still find themselves placed within material, recognisable, spaces. This book explores what the idea of 'world' can mean to a subject who appears to have moved into a material, even ecological, space that is beyond categories of life and death, being and world.Key Features:Provides a philosophical reading of Samuel BeckettRethinks Beckett in relation to the posthumanContributes to a relatively ignored aspect of Samuel Beckett's writing, the short prose

The representation and experience of embodiment is a central preoccupation of Samuel Beckett’s drama, one that he explored through diverse media. McMullan investigates the full range of Beckett’s dramatic canon for stage, radio, television and film, including early drama, mimes and unpublished fragments. She examines how Beckett’s drama composes and recomposes the body in each medium, and provokes ways of perceiving, conceiving and experiencing embodiment that address wider preoccupations with corporeality, technology and systems of power. McMullan argues that the body in Beckett’s drama reveals a radical vulnerability of the flesh, questioning corporeal norms based on perfectible, autonomous or invulnerable bodies, but is also the site of a continual reworking of the self, and of the boundaries between self and other. Beckett’s re-imagining of the body presents embodiment as a collaborative performance between past and present, flesh and imagination, self and other, including the spectator / listener.

Bertolt Brecht's silent Kattrin in Mother Courage, or the disability performance lessons of his Peachum in The Threepenny Opera; Tennessee Williams' limping Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie and hard-of-hearing Bodey in A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur; Samuel Beckett's blind Hamm and his physically disabled parents Nagg and Nell in Endgame – these and many further examples attest to disability's critical place in modern drama. This Companion explores how disability performance studies and theatre practice provoke new debate about the place of disability in these works. The book traces the local and international processes and tensions at play in disability theatre, and offers a critical investigation of the challenges its aesthetics pose to mainstream and traditional practice. The book's first part surveys disability theatre's primary principles, critical terms, internal debates and key challenges to theatre practice. Examining specific disability theatre productions of modern drama, it also suggests how disability has been re-envisaged and embodied on stage. In the book's second part, leading disability studies scholars and disability theatre practitioners analyse and creatively re-imagine modern drama, demonstrating how disability aesthetics press practitioners and scholars to rethink these works in generative, valuable and timely ways.