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 Content
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
Mc Frederick.- 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.
About the author
William Davies is a research fellow at the University of Reading, UK. His work on Samuel Beckett includes various articles and book chapters, the volume Samuel Beckett and Europe: History, Culture, Tradition (2017), co-edited with Michela Bariselli and Niamh M. Bowe, the monograph Samuel Beckett and the Second World War (2020) and The Poetry of Samuel Beckett (2021), co-edited with James Brophy.
Helen Bailey is an independent scholar and works as an Access to HE tutor at Loughborough College of Further and Higher Education, UK. Her publications appear in various journals and books, including The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary English and Irish Poetry (2013), Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui (2019) and The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature (2021). She is currently preparing a book on Beckett, music and spirituality.
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