Description
This collection of essays reveals the extent to which politics is fundamental to our understanding of Samuel Beckett’s life and writing. Bringing together internationally established and emerging scholars, Beckett and Politics considers Beckett’s work as it relates to three broad areas of political discourse: language politics, biopolitics and geopolitics. Through a range of critical approaches, including performance studies, political theory, gender theory, historicizing approaches and language theory, the book demonstrates how politics is more than just another thematic lens: it is fundamentally and structurally intrinsic to Beckett’s life, his texts and subsequent interpretations of them. This important collection of essays demonstrates that Beckett’s work is not only ripe for political engagement, but also contains significant opportunities for understanding and illuminating the broader relationships between literature, culture and politics.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction, Helen Bailey & William Davies.- 2. The Politics of Forms in Beckett’s Writing, Nadia Louar.- 3. Beckett, Contradiction and a Textual Politics of Change, Arka Chattopadhyay.- 4. “Made of words”: Beckett and the Politics of Language, Alan Graham.- 5. “First the Place, Then I’ll Find Me in It”: The Unnamable’s Pronouns and the Politics of Confinement, James Little.- 6. Beckett, Evangelicalism and the Biopolitics of Famine, Seán Kennedy.- 7. Tweaking Misogyny or Misogyny Twisted: Beckett’s Take on “Aristotle and Phyllis” in Happy Days, Kumiko Kiuchi.- 8. Insufferable Maternity and Motherhood in “First Love”, Brenda O’Connell.- 9. Beckett, Biopolitics and the Problem of Life, Marc Farrant.- 10. Beckett’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young “Post-War Degenerate”, Giovanna Vincenti.- 11. Waiting for Godot and the Fascist Aesthetics of the Bod, Hannah Simpson.- 12. Political Theatre and the Beckett Problem, Emilie Morin.- 13. “The air is full of our cries”: Staging Godot during apartheid South Africa, Matthew McFrederick.- 14. Samuel Beckett’s Nominalist Politics and the Pitfalls of ‘Presentism’, Matthew Feldman.- 15. Samuel Beckett’s Subaltern Figures, Brendan Dowling.- 16. The Big House in the Suburbs: Home Thoughts from Abroad in Watt, Feargal Whelan.- 17. Beckett and the Politics of Empathy in Site-Specific Theatre, Niamh M. Bowe.- 18. Towards A Modernism with Meaning: Beckett’s Refugees, Rodney Sharkey.- 19. Afterword, Peter Boxall.
