Samuel Beckett and Ecology

Nicholas E. Johnson, Trish McTighe, Céline Thobois-Gupta

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781350366046
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

This is the first full-length book to investigate Samuel Beckett's work through contemporary ecological thinking, offering a wide range of artistic and scholarly responses to the ecological crises provoked, mediated or challenged by Beckett's work. Beckett was not an environmental artist, but his oeuvre, poised between forms of precarity and hope, is a rich territory for the exploration of the most pressing issues of our time: the rift between the human species, its technological and economic advancement and the ecologies that sustain it all. In recent years, Beckett's name, aphorisms and work have been invoked relative to environmental catastrophe, helping stimulate debates on ecology, the arts and the ecosystemic place of the human. The volume reflects on ecology as a productive term, as well as the varied practices and narratives in Beckettian intermedial ecologies. While some authors offer new insights into the connections between Beckett and the Anthropocene across translation, adaptation, performance and the visual arts, others also explore the potential of Happy Days (1961) for ecological thought and the role it has taken in recent ecodramaturgical experiments in the theatre. Woven throughout the volume are short bursts of writing, 'coups de gong', which testify to the variety of Beckett-inspired local responses to global climate instability.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘All this, when will all this have been … just play?’: Situating Beckett and Ecology
• Part 1 ‘The tree is pulled up and disappears in flies’ – Beckettian Ecologies: Epistemologies, Practices, Discourses
• 1 Samuel Beckett’s Theatre and Dark Ecology
• 2 A Dusty Coup from Argentina
• 3 ‘a specialist of neither more nor less importance than the other specialists involved’:
• 4 Cultural and Linguistic Ecologies: Reading Samuel Beckett in Saudi Arabia
• 5 Translating the Ecological Aspects of Beckett’s Drama into Japanese Theatre
• 6 The Translator as Cultural Mediator:
• 7 Samuel Beckett and Televisual Ecosystems: Dramas of the Vast Wasteland
• 8 Workshopping Beckett in Algeria for the Streets of the World
• Part 2 ‘And to think all that is organic waste!’ – Beckett and the Anthropocene / Beckett in the Anthropocene
• 9 Retrofitting Beckett: John Millington Synge, Druid Theatre and Waiting for Godot on Inis Meáin
• 10 ‘Old Wall’: Reading Endgame’s Pictographs with Australian Indigenous Rock Art
• 11 A Tree and a Stone in Waiting for Godot: Precarity in Beckett
• 12 Beckett to Gather the World?
• 13 Terra Incognita: Beckett’s Anthropo(s)cene in Contemporary Art
• 14 Rastreadoras Del Fuerte and the Unearthing of their Lost and Loved Ones: Beckettian Ecologies and the More-than-Human Eye
• 15 ‘Toute cette question du climat’: The More-than-Human World in Beckett’s Trilogy
• 16 Ecological Crises and Local Manifestations in Godot Aaya Kya?
• Part 3 ‘The earth is really tight today’: The Ecodramaturgy of Happy Days
• 17 Samuel Beckett and Terrain Vague: A Case Study on Happy Days
• 18 ‘Shall I myself not melt perhaps in the end, or burn …’: Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days in Times of Ecological Turmoil
• 19 Happy Days in Los Angeles: An Ecology of the Unhoused
• 20 Beckett’s Haunting of the Landscape and Language of Ireland
• 21 The Ecoscenography of Beckett sa Chreig: Laethanta Sona: From Imagination to Making to Monumentalizing
• 22 Hybrid Bodies: A Hydro- and Ecofeminist Reading of Company SJ’s Beckett sa Chreig: Laethanta Sona
• 23 Conclusion: Coup de pousse
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright