New analyses on the insightful ways in which Beckett’s work actively engages with contested notions of Nature and the natural, developing a radical version of modernism’s main questions and insights.
Beckett and Nature takes its cue from contemporary developments in Beckett scholarship focused on ecocriticism, posthumanism, and the Anthropocene, going beyond them into a questioning of the very concepts of “Nature” and “the natural.” It examines one of the most unthought ontological dimensions of literature and life: that symbolic space, deemed natural or part of Nature, appears necessary and undeniable and, therefore, impossible to be deconstructed. In doing so, the authors show that, in fact, this space takes on many shapes, recognizing three “natural” dimensions criticized by Beckett: bodies, worlds, and literatures.
Featuring a wide range of both Beckett's work and Beckett scholars – including Jean-Michel Rabaté and Stanley E. Gontarski – Beckett and Nature offers contextualized readings of the understandings of nature and the natural throughout his decade-spanning œuvre. The volume shows that part of the radicality of Beckett’s writing is that – through a variety of evolving techniques and strategies – it questions what appears in our cultures as the most unquestionable and opens up possibilities for thinking not only what is human, literature, and philosophy, but also gender, identity, and any attempt at definitions of ourselves or the world at large.
Table of Contents:
List of FIgures
Acknowledgements
Introduction (Charles Clements, Tufts University, USA, Eleanor Green, University of Manchester, UK, and James Martell, Lyon College, USA)
Part I. Natural Bodies
1. Mother Remains: Beckett’s autour Function and the Ecological (Jonathan Basile, University of British Columbia, Canada)
2. Nonrelational Literature and Immanent Metaphysics: What Spinoza’s Nature Has to Say About Beckett's Form (Charles Clements, Tufts University, USA)
3. "For the space of an instant": Beckett on the Subject of Thought (Bryan Counter, Framingham State University, USA)
4. Enough Is Too Much: Reading Gender through Flowers in Beckett (Eleanor Green, University of Manchester, UK)
5. Clinical Olfactory Environment Shapes Care Relationships in Samuel Beckett’s Murphy and Sam Thompson’s Jott. (Swati Joshi, Independent Researcher, India)
Part II. Natural Worlds
6. Breathing Human within Breathless Nature: Waiting for Godot in Pakistan (Saeed Muhammad Nasir, Emerson University Multan, Pakistan)
7. Samuel Beckett’s Neo-Biomorphic Playlet Breath (1969) Sets the Stage for the Pirana (Swati Joshi, Independent Researcher, India)
8. Foreseeing and Foresaying the Buddhist Unborn beyond Birth and Death in Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said (Asijit Datta, Symbiosis Centre for Media and Communication, Symbiosis International (Deemed University), India)
9. Adorno’s Dialectic of Natural Beauty and Beckett’s Not I (Justin Neville Kaushall, Independent Scholar, UK)
10. The Inanimate Agency: An Object-Oriented Ontological Reading of Beckett’s Endgame and Its Anti-Anthropocentric Implications (Mehmet Zeki Giritli, Koç University, Turkey)
Part III. Natural Literatures
11. Beckett’s Foiled Mimesis is/in Nature (James Martell, Lyon College, USA)
12. Beckett and the Scream of Nature (Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania, USA)
13. "Everything oozes": On Mud and Molebane in Beckett’s Dystopian Landscapes (Stanley E. Gontarski, Florida State University, USA)
14. Denaturing and Renaturing: Samuel Beckett’s Reception in Martin McDonagh’s Cinema (Jack Dudley, Mount St. Mary’s University, USA)
Notes on Contributors
Index
