Overview

In the shadow of the Holocaust, Samuel Beckett captures humanity in ruins through his debased beings and a decomposing mode of writing that strives to 'fail better'. But what might it mean to be a 'creature' or 'creaturely' in Beckett's world? In the first full-length study of the concept of the creature in Beckett's prose and drama, this book traces the suspended lives and melancholic existences of Beckett's ignorant and impotent creatures to assess the extent to which political value marks the divide between human and inhuman. Through close readings of Beckett’s prose and drama, particularly texts from the middle period, including Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Anderton explicates four arenas of creaturely life in Beckett. Each chapter attends to a particular theme – testimony, power, humour and survival – to analyse a range of pressures and impositions that precipitate the creaturely state of suspension. Drawing on the writings of Adorno, Agamben, Benjamin, Deleuze and Derrida to explore the overlaps between artistic and political structures of creation, the creature emerges as an in-between figure that bespeaks the provisional nature of the human. The result is a provocative examination of the indirect relationship between art and history through Beckett's treatment of testimony, power, humour and survival, which each attest to the destabilisation of meaning after Auschwitz.

Full Product Details

Author:   Joseph Anderton (University of Nottingham, UK)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   Methuen Drama
Weight:   0.313kg
ISBN:  

9781350054431

ISBN 10:   1350054437
Pages:   264
Publication Date:   30 November 2017
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

Introduction What is a Beckettian Creature? Last Human and Becoming-Animal Concepts of the Creature and Creaturely Life Beckett After 1945 Chapter 1: Testimony: Bearing Witness to the Event and Self 'Impossibility of Expressing': Art of Failure and Lacuna of Testimony Fallibility and Dissociation (In)sovereign Author-Narrators Obligation to Testify: Mechanics, Enunciation, Ruins Testimony of Fiction Chapter 2: Power: Master-Servant Relationships Exercising Writing: Fascist Regime Against Liberal Art Watt the Fungible and Knott There: Objectified Servant and Absent Master ‘A vague supplication’: Melancholy in Waiting for Godot Master-Servant Context: The Holocaust and the Jewish Creature Biopolitical Struggles: Territory and Custody Chapter 3: Humour: Failure and Degradation Humour in Failure Textual Performances Words and Flesh in Endgame Metanarrative Tragicomedy ‘turd waiting for the flush’: Gallows Humour Chapter 4: Survival: Incompleteness and Continuation ‘oh all to end’: Beckettian Stirrings Still Creaturely ‘Undeadness’ Repetition and Performance Forms of Activity and Stasis in Molloy ‘finish dying’: Death Without Death in Molloy 6. Epilogue Endnotes Bibliography Index

Reviews

Focusing on the moment in Samuel Beckett's life and work where understandings of humanity and human relationships began to break down, this study considers the narrators and central characters in his plays and prose as creatures, trapped between humanity and inhumanity and forced to endure the existential crisis of survival. * TDR: The Drama Review *

Author Information

Joseph Anderton is Assistant Professor in Drama and Performance at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is author of the chapter ‘Hooves! The Equine Presence in Beckett’ in Beckett and Animals (2013) and has reviewed for The Journal of Beckett Studies and The Journal of European Humour Research.

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