Full Description
"You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on." These are some of the most quoted lines written by Samuel Beckett, which speak to the impulse of persevering in times of crisis and impossibility. Yet few readers of Beckett agree about what this paradoxical formula could mean, let alone what mode of engagement it would seem to indicate, be it committed, autonomous, or something else entirely. This volume of essays explores what that mode of engagement could be, all the while elucidating the ethical and political stakes of the "ongoing" in both Beckett's life and work. Across multiple disciplines in the humanities, the authors delve into questions of political subjectivity and representation, the ethics of powerlessness and refusal, the aesthetics of syncopation and destitution, multimedia experiments between genre, as well as Beckett's wider impact on transnational itineraries of modernism and philosophy up to the contemporary.
Contents
Chapter 1: "Beckett. On." David Lloyd (University of California, Riverside).- Chapter 2: "'Where you are worth nothing': Beckett, Geulincx, and an Ethics of the Miracle," Gabriel Quigley (New York University).- Chapter 3: "Philosophy in the Flesh: Feeling, Folly, and Animals in Beckett's Molloy," William Broadway (University of Wisconsin-Madison).- Chapter 4: "GGREY! (Beckett/dialectic)," Rebecca Comay (University of Toronto).- Chapter 5: "Reading Beckett's Bilingualism with Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Rancière," Nadia Louar (University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh).- Chapter 6: "Rêve de transfert collective: Beckett's Resurgent Unanimism," Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania).- Chapter 7: "'The Golden Moment': Violence, Escape, and Broken Immanence" Michael Krimper (New York University).- Chapter 8: "Respirer sans cesse: Proust and Beckett's Intermissions," Stefanie Heine (University of Toronto).- Chapter 9: "The Grammar of Absurdity and Affective Crisis: Reading Anna Burns' Milkman through Beckett's Philosophic Comedy," John Waters (New York University).
