Overview

This book argues that the abject, decrepit body in Beckett does not signal the impossibility of agency but demands its reconceptualisation. Analysing the representation of the body in relation to the environment in Beckett's work, the author interrogates the power to do and act. Separating dynamic interaction from willed intention, Amanda Dennis shows how Beckett's oeuvre refashions subjectivity in dialogue with a disintegrating environment. The book provides a phenomenological reading of Beckett to argue that sensation and embodiment support our interactions with our material world, enabling possibilities for embodied agency in collaboration with our physical and linguistic surroundings.

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9781474463003

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"""Attending to the meaning-making potential of the body in space,"" Amanda Dennis demonstrates the continuing value of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology for an understanding of Beckett's posthuman ecology. Beckett and Embodiment is a timely and important study written with a keen and critical intelligence."""" -Professor Jonathan Boulter, Western University"

Author Information

Amanda M. Dennis is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the American University of Paris. She co-edited the recent volume Samuel Beckett and the Nonhuman (Brill, 2020), and her articles have appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature, the Journal of Beckett Studies and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, among other places. She has held fellowships and visiting lectureships in France, the US, the UK and Spain, and she is the author of the novel Her Here (Bellevue Literary Press, 2021).

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