Beckett and Nature

Charles Clements, Eleanor Green, James Martell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9798765125434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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

• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Natural Bodies
• Chapter 1: Mother Remains: Beckett’s autour Function and the Ecological
• Chapter 2: Nonrelational Literature and Immanent Metaphysics: What Spinoza’s Nature Has to Say About Beckett’s Form
• Chapter 3: “For the space of an instant”: Beckett on the Subject of Thought
• Chapter 4: Enough is Too Much: Reading Sex Through Flowers in Beckett
• Chapter 5: Clinical Olfactory Environment Shapes Care Relationships in Samuel Beckett’s Murphy and Sam Thompson’s Jott
• Part II: Natural Worlds
• Chapter 6: Breathing Human Within Breathless Nature: Waiting for Godot in Pakistan
• Chapter 7: Samuel Beckett’s Neo-biomorphic Playlet Breath (1969) Sets the Stage for the Pirana
• Chapter 8: Foreseeing and Foresaying the Buddhist Unborn Beyond Birth and Death in Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said
• Chapter 9: Adorno’s Dialectic of Natural Beauty and Beckett’s Not I
• Chapter 10: The Inanimate Agency: An Object-Oriented Ontological Reading of Beckett’s Endgame and Its Anti-anthropocentric Implications
• Part III: Natural Literatures
• Chapter 11: Beckett’s Foiled Mimesis is/in Nature
• Chapter 12: Beckett and the Scream of Nature
• Chapter 13: “Everything oozes”: On Mud and Molebane in Beckett’s Dystopian Landscapes
• Chapter 14: Denaturing and Renaturing: Samuel Beckett’s Reception in Martin McDonagh’s Cinema
• Notes on Contributors
• Index