Overview

This book re-examines the Nobel laureate's post-war prose and drama in the light of contemporary trauma theory. Through a series of sustained close-readings, the study demonstrates how the comings and goings of Beckett's prose unsettles the Western philosophical tradition; it reveals how Beckett's live theatrical productions are haunted by the rehearsal of traumatic repetition, and asks what his ghostly radio recordings might signal for twentieth-century modernity. Drawing from psychoanalytic and poststructuralist traditions, Beckett's Late Stage explores how the traumatic symptom allows us to rethink the relationship between language, meaning, and identity after 1945.

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9783838210353

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We had always suspected that Beckett's destitute characters, his black humour, his bleak one-liners, his cynical minimalism had to do with some form of trauma linked with war-time experiences, but no-one had attempted to read the whole post-war production as a deployment of a phenomenology of trauma. Rhys Tranter is the first to use the whole gamut of protocols developed by trauma studies and bring them to bear on Beckett's canon from the forties to the eighties. The result is a highly rewarding book full of new insights, superb close readings, and poignant meditations on a time of wounds, yet open to a different future. - Prof. Jean-Michel Rabat , University of Pennsylvania

"""We had always suspected that Beckett's destitute characters, his black humour, his bleak one-liners, his cynical minimalism had to do with some form of trauma linked with war-time experiences, but no-one had attempted to read the whole post-war production as a deployment of a phenomenology of trauma. Rhys Tranter is the first to use the whole gamut of protocols developed by trauma studies and bring them to bear on Beckett's canon from the forties to the eighties. The result is a highly rewarding book full of new insights, superb close readings, and poignant meditations on a time of wounds, yet open to a different future.""- Prof. Jean-Michel Rabat�, University of Pennsylvania"

Author Information

"""Paul Stewart is Professor of Literature at the University of Nicosia. He is the author of two books on BeckettSex and Aesthetics in Samuel Becketts Works (Palgrave, 2011) and Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Becketts Disjunctions (Rodopi, 2006)and the series editor for Samuel Beckett in Company, published by ibidem Press. He has published widely on Beckett in such journals as The Journal of Beckett Studies and Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourdhui. He is also a creative writer (his novel Now Then was published by Armida in 2014) and a performer in theatre, television, and film."""

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