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Beckett’s Sense of History in the Age of Catastrophe
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A stark departure from traditional philology, What is Authorial Philology? is the first comprehensive treatment of authorial philology as a discipline in its own right. It provides readers with an excellent introduction to the theory and practice of editing ‘authorial texts’ alongside an exploration of authorial philology in its cultural and conceptual architecture. The originality and distinction of this work lies in its clear systematization of a discipline whose autonomous status has only recently been recognised (at least in Italy), though its roots may extend back as far as Giorgio Pasquali.
This pioneering volume offers both a methodical set of instructions on how to read critical editions, and a wide range of practical examples, expanding upon the conceptual and methodological apparatus laid out in the first two chapters. By presenting a thorough account of the historical and theoretical framework through which authorial philology developed, Paola Italia and Giulia Raboni successfully reconceptualize the authorial text as an ever-changing organism, subject to alteration and modification.
What is Authorial Philology? will be of great didactic value to students and researchers alike, providing readers with a fuller understanding of the rationale behind different editing practices, and addressing both traditional and newer methods such as the use of the digital medium and its implications. Spanning the whole Italian tradition from Petrarch to Carlo Emilio Gadda, this ground-breaking volume provokes us to consider important questions concerning a text’s dynamism, the extent to which an author is ‘agentive’, and, most crucially, about the very nature of what we read.
This essay reads the ungraspable relation to death in Beckett’s works as a means to think through our contemporary era of climate crisis. Beckett’s singular aesthetics of human finitude can be a powerful resource for thinking the unthinkable. By envisaging finitude in terms of the limits imposed on life by both space and time, this essay seeks to ground the existential framework of Beckett’s oeuvre in terms of an always embedded self. Looking at the short story “The End,” I show how such embeddedness may work to evade totalisation or abstraction in terms of a universal worldview, yet also how it poses problems for any privileging of materiality as such. Beckett’s writings are thereby seen to produce a dynamic ethics between world and earth, the global and the local, life and death.
This study undoes the customary division of the 1940s into the Second World War and after, focusing instead on the thematic preoccupations that emerged from writers’ immersion in and resistance to the conflict. Through seven chapters – Documenting, Desiring, Killing, Escaping, Grieving, Adjusting and Atomizing – the book sets middlebrow and popular writers alongside residual modernists and new voices to reconstruct the literary landscape of the period. This is a decade that does not fit into the canonical story of twentieth-century literature, and this book restores to prominence the innovative work undertaken in areas such as documentary prose, the short story, mainstream theatre and realist fiction. The book also examines the relationship between cinema and literature, exploring the extent to which transitions in narrative form cross the boundaries of media. Detailed case studies of novels, stories, drama and poetry provide fresh critical perspectives on a range of writers including Margery Allingham, Alexander Baron, Elizabeth Bowen, Keith Douglas, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Henry Green, Georgette Heyer, Alun Lewis, Nancy Mitford, George Orwell, Mervyn Peake, J. B. Priestley, Terence Rattigan, Mary Renault, Stevie Smith, Dylan Thomas and Evelyn Waugh. Arguing that the postwar is a concept that emerges almost simultaneously with the war itself, and that ‘peace’ is significant only by its absence in an emergent post-atomic cold war era, this book reclaims the complexity of a decade all too often lost in the fault-lines between pre-war modernism and the emergence of the postmodern.
This book offers a new interpretation of the links between literature, ethics, and philosophy in Beckett’s works. It surveys the entire corpus with a focus on the post-war period, when Beckett found a wider audience and broke from his mentors Joyce and Proust. Beckett’s decision to write in French, and his subsequent bilingualism, were no accidents but followed a program placing him among post-war writers who rejected Sartre and developed a “writing degree zero” as offering a post-Holocaust literary expression. Two philosophers examined in this historical context are Adorno and Badiou. If they often contradict each other, they converge on many points: Adorno sees that one can be a poet after Auschwitz; Badiou grasps how one can combine beautiful forms and a reduction of life to its generic essentials. For both, Beckett offers a lesson in courage, showing that life is worth living in spite of innumerable reasons to despair. The theme of animals permits a further exploration of life reduced to survival. A red thread comes from Beckett’s friendship with Bataille and their fascination with the Marquis de Sade. Both debunk post-war humanism. Bataille’s philosophy of the Impossible, of excess and transgression, was rephrased in a muted manner by Beckett who preferred Dante, Descartes, Geulincx, Kant and Freud to sketch an ethics of humility. All the while, his works are marked by an inimitable sense of metaphysical comedy that creates an infectious and enduring laughter.
Samuel Beckett’s Watt is, in some obvious sense, a war book. However, it is often read in eccentric relation to its historical context. Citing both Ireland’s neutrality policies and Beckett’s encounters with Nazism, James McNaughton (2018) reads the novel as a sustained interrogation of modern mechanisms of propaganda and state control. If the Irish setting displaces any immediate wartime connections, the absurd reasoning Watt deploys offers a frightening allegory for the barbaric logics of fascism. This essay both extends and complicates this reading by looking back to the critiques of realist fiction that Beckett developed over a decade earlier in his lectures on the history of the novel at Trinity College, Dublin, and in his own first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women . In doing so, it explores the extent to which Watt represents a culmination of formal experimentation that was put in train at the beginning of Beckett’s career, a process which gained dramatic political urgency in a world at war.
The significance of the Second World War in Europe as an impactful historical event in Beckett’s life cannot be overstated, but it must also be borne in mind that the whole of his life to that point was experienced in the shadow of an equally strong environment of political, military and social upheaval in his native country. Born in Ireland in 1906, he witnessed the unsuccessful military rebellion of 1916, the prolonged guerrilla war of Independence of 1919–1921, and the short but savage Civil War of 1922–1923. While certainly unequal in scale, the uncertainty and violence Beckett experienced in France from 1939 to 1945 should be read as a continuum which began for him with the mayhem that ultimately led to the creation of the Irish Free State. With this in mind, this chapter argues that the political concerns of early twentieth-century Irish life, which are inescapable given their ubiquity in the national discourse, informed much of Beckett’s thinking when he came to compose the novel Watt.
Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath explores Beckett's literary responses to the political maelstroms of his formative and middle years: the Irish civil war and the crisis of commitment in 1930s Europe, the rise of fascism and the atrocities of World War II. Archive yields a Beckett who monitored propaganda in speeches and newspapers, and whose creative work engages with specific political strategies, rhetoric, and events. Finally, Beckett's political aesthetic sharpens into focus.
Deep within form, Beckett models ominous historical developments as surely as he satirizes artistic and philosophical interpretations that overlook them. He burdens aesthetic production with guilt: imagination and language, theater and narrative, all parallel political techniques. Beckett comically embodies conservative religious and political doctrines; he plays Irish colonial history against contemporary European horrors; he examines aesthetic complicity in effecting atrocity and covering it up. This book offers insightful, original, and vivid readings of Beckett's work up to Three Novels and Endgame.
History in Tatters: Bodies and Things in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre (A. McMullan)Drawing on concepts such as the chiasm in Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, this article argues that Beckett’s theatre creates a dynamic stage space that includes a spectrum of being from human to things. On the one hand, this might be termed a posthuman perspective, in that it presents a critique of anthropocentric humanism; on the other, a kind of transference takes place between bodies and objects (from the tree in Godot to the rocking chair in Rockaby) so that subjectivity or indeed affectivity is invested in the entire visual field, including both bodies and objects or parts thereof, both the seen and the unseen. Moreover, things, including props but also costume, materialize historical references and counter the sense of Beckett’s a-historical spaces to suggest multiple, layered histories. Beckett’s theatre therefore stages a vision that, while rooted in the phenomenological present, encourages an expanded perception which places the human in the frame of a dysfunctional creation which includes the human, animal, vegetable and for want of a better word, things, but also in a temporal frame that layers or ‘sediments’ the present with fragments of memory and history, both recent and ancient.
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.
In the past decade, there has been an unprecedented upsurge of interest in Samuel Beckett's works. The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett offers an accessible and engrossing introduction to a key set of issues animating the field of Beckett studies today. This Companion considers Beckett's lasting significance by addressing a host of relevant topics. Written by a team of renowned scholars, this volume presents a continuum in Beckett studies ranging from theoretical approaches to performance studies, from manuscript research to the study of bilingualism, intertextuality, late modernism, history, philosophy, ethics, body and mind. The emphasis on burgeoning critical approaches aids the reader's understanding of recent developments in Beckett studies while prompting further exploration, assisted by the guide to further reading.
‘Where now? Who now? When now?’ The three questions with which Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (1953) opens are, for good reason, generally seen as pertaining to the individual who utters them, that residual figure beyond or beneath the various ‘vice-existers’, from Belacqua to Malone, who populate Beckett’s earlier novels. These questions might no less pertinently be applied, however, to Beckett’s œuvre as a whole. Where, if anywhere, does that œuvre belong within modern literary history? Should it be seen as part of European ‘high’ modernism, alongside the works of Proust, Joyce and Pound, on each of whom Beckett wrote appreciatively in the late 1920s and early 1930s? Or is Beckett’s place more properly within the fold of literary postmodernism, alongside writers such as Jorge Luis Borges (with whom he shared the Formentor Group’s International Prize in 1961), Vladimir Nabokov and Italo Calvino? Or should one resist the homogenising urge, and instead break down Beckett’s œuvre - produced, as it was, over a period of sixty years - into a series of more or less discrete phases? Taking this latter approach, one might, for instance, identify an early, modernist phase, epitomised by Beckett’s first, Joyce-indebted novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written in 1931–2), and a later, postmodernist phase, initiated in Watt and continuing in the postwar novels Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable and the plays, commencing with Eleutheria and Waiting for Godot. Or are all such attempts to locate Beckett within one or more literary movement not only futile, but in principle wrongheaded? Is his œuvre perhaps best understood as sui generis - as Beckett himself suggests all genuine art must be, when, in his ‘Homage to Jack B. Yeats’ (1954), he claims that the true artist (who ‘stakes his being’ in his work) belongs to no tradition, and is quite simply ‘from nowhere’ (Dis 149) - an inexplicable manifestation of the all-too-human need to express?
Watt, Samuel Beckett's "anti-logical" interwar novel, is generally recognized as a parody of the binary oppositions that underlie logical systems. This article moves beyond readings of Wat t as a pastiche of logical positivism or as the sign of rationalism's exhaustion to argue that the novel's "glitches in logic" initiate a sensual poetics whereby sound-textures come to rival semantic sense. The text does exploit the pitfalls of rational systems, particularly their tendency to elide the body and their inability to code for infinite numbers or emotions, but where the zeros and ones of binary code approach absurdity, different possibilities for meaning emerge. Through references to bodily experience, desires, and ailments, as well as through associations of sounds and laughter, Watt, anticipating characteristics of Beckett's later texts, emphasizes the body as necessary to the construction of meaning in language.
This article articulates two prominent, competing explanations about cognitive effects of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and
assesses them against historical documents. Humanities scholars' writings on the earthquake imply what I refer to as a “Secularizing
Interpretation,” which says that the earthquake caused cognitive change across social classes and geographical regions. Results
from the cognitive science of religion yield what I refer to as the “Cognitive Science of Religion Hypothesis.” This hypothesis
says that people of the period interpreted this earthquake as caused (1) by God; (2) on purpose; (3) as a punishment; (4)
on the out-group. The Secularizing Interpretation and the Cognitive Science of Religion Hypothesis are mutually inconsistent.
This means that if one is shown to be true, the other is therefore false. This article advocates the Cognitive Science of
Religion Hypothesis in two steps. Review of writings of philosophers and elites reveals little to no secularizing cognitive
change. Review of writings by other authors reveals increases in religious and supernatural punishment cognition after the
earthquake. This project recommends interdisciplinary methods to researchers in the humanities, which enable them to put their
interpretations to the test.
Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett is one of the most profoundly original writers of our century. A tremendously influential poet and dramatist, Beckett spoke of his prose fiction as the "important writing", the medium in which his ideas were most powerfully distilled. Here, for the first time, his short prose is gathered in a definitive, complete volume by leading Beckett scholar S.E. Gontarski.
This article contextualizes Samuel Beckett's art criticism within post-war French critical debate about what constitutes “the human.” Beckett announces the question as central to the period. The post-war debate traversed the spheres of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy, and Beckett's criticism is here brought into contact with that of his contemporaries: Jean-Paul Sartre, Francis Ponge, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Martin Heidegger. Consequently, a more historicized reading of Beckett's art criticism and of the political stakes of his work comes into focus, especially in regard to“The End,” Eleutheria, and Molloy. This article proposes that Beckett's art criticism as well as his fiction be understood as part of the history of critical theory.
This book argues that catastrophe is a particular way of governing future events – such as terrorism, climate change or pandemics – which we cannot predict but which may strike suddenly, without warning, and cause irreversible damage. At a time where catastrophe increasingly functions as a signifier of our future, imaginaries of pending doom have fostered new modes of anticipatory knowledge and redeployed existing ones. Although it shares many similarities with crises, disasters, risks and other disruptive incidents, this book claims that catastrophes also bring out the very limits of knowledge and management. The politics of catastrophe is turned towards an unknown future, which must be imagined and inhabited in order to be made palpable, knowable and actionable. Politics of Catastrophe critically assesses the effects of these new practices of knowing and governing catastrophes to come and challenges the reader to think about the possibility of an alternative politics of catastrophe. This book will be of interest to students of critical security studies, risk theory, political theory and International Relations in general.
Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose: 1950-1976
- Samuel Beckett
Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still
- Samuel Beckett
The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett
- C J Ackerley
- S E Gontarski
- CJ Ackerley
‘Beckett, German Fascism, and History: The Futility of Protest
- James Mcnaughton
Selected Poems, 1930-1989
- Samuel Beckett
‘“Paddy fait de la résistance
- David Murphy
The Age of Catastrophe, 1914-1945
- Heinrich Winkler
- August