Full Description
Samuel Beckett and Catastrophe is a groundbreaking collection of original essays that explore the relation between Samuel Beckett and catastrophe in terms of war, the Holocaust, nuclear disasters and ecological crisis. Responding to the post-catastrophic situations in the twentieth century, Beckett created characters who often seem to have been through an unknown catastrophe. Although the importance of catastrophe in Beckett has been noted sporadically, there has been no substantial attempt to discuss his aesthetics and work in relation to it. This collection will therefore serve as the first sustained study to explore the theme of catastrophe in Beckett and will be a highly significant contribution to Beckett studies.
Chapter "Slow Violence and Slow Going: Encountering Beckettin the Time of Climate Catastrophe" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Contents
1. Introduction.- Part I: Catastrophe and Aesthetic Creation.- 2. Tickling your catastrophe, or Beckett's Laughing Antistrophe.- 3. The Not-all Catastrophe in Ill Seen Ill Said / Mal vu mal dit and 'Comment dire' / 'what is the word' by Samuel Beckett.- 4. Beckett's Grey and the Temporality of Afterness.- 5. Samuel Beckett's Catastrophic Synthesis between Leibniz and Schopenhauer.- Part II: Catastrophes in History.- 6. Beckett's Sense of History in the Age of Catastrophe.- 7. Imagination's Dead: Beckett's Catastrophic Realism.- 8. Catastrophe and Everyday Life in Samuel Beckett.- Part III: Ecological Catastrophe and the Role of Art.- 9. Slow Violence and Slow Going: Encountering Beckett in the Time of Climate Catastrophe.- 10. A Feminist Counter-apocalyptic Interpretation of Precarity: Reading Samuel Beckett's Catastrophe in the Post-catastrophe Age.- 11. Gestures of Helpless Compassion: Beckett's Eco-poetics of Extinction.
