Samuel Beckett and Medicine

Ulrika Maude

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108896337
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Samuel Beckett and Medicine offers the first sustained analysis of the author's abiding interest in medicine and medical discourses, advancing insights into the representation of illness, neurodiversity, disability, ageing, and dying in his work. It analyses Beckett's representation of the production of language, offering new ways of understanding the often perplexing formal and stylistic experimentation of his work. The book addresses the many automatic and habitual functions staged in his writing and considers the impact of nerve theory, reflexes, affect, and the viscera on his work. It advances new readings of Beckett's poetry, prose, and television and stage plays, drawing on his reading notes on medicine and psychology, and on his correspondence and critical writings. Through its refusal to aestheticize embodied experience or to yield to the metaphysical consolations of literature, Beckett's work challenges us to confront the intricacies of embodied being and to encounter the question of finitude.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Beckett’s Medical Imagination
• Chapter 1 Poetry, Illness, and Medicine
• Chapter 2 Chronic Conditions: Keats, Johnson, and Beckett
• Chapter 3 Convulsive Aesthetics: Charcot, Chaplin, and Gilles de la Tourette
• Chapter 4 Nerve Theory, Conditioned Reflex, and Literary Form
• Chapter 5 Writing Viscera: Beckett’s Inhuman Domain
• Chapter 6 ‘Temporarily Sane’: Beckett and Modernist Suicide
• Chapter 7 Beckett’s Affective Telepoetics
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index