Samuel Beckett and posthuman spaces

Journal of Beckett Studies, 2021

The question, in Beckett's writing, of the subject, the body, speech, language, the world-in short, of what constitutes the human-is, for scholars, not exactly new. However, as Jonathan Boulter points out at the outset of Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett's Short Prose, 'posthumanism' is a somewhat recent addition to Beckett scholarship. Given this-in addition to the problematisation of the above categories-it is tempting to attribute to Beckett a sort of nihilism, a destruction of the human subject. Boulter convincingly shows, however, that this would be to speak in haste; Beckett's prose, rather than simply emptying or otherwise absenting the subject, is a critique of the subject in the true sense of the term: an analysis of the component elements of the human, an attempt to understand its context (ecological or social), an attempt to come to terms with the complexities of the subject's place in the world. (2) The founding suggestion of this text, then, is that some of Beckett's short works in particular articulate a certain version

Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, 2020

Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies, 2022

The article focuses on the posthuman authorship in the late short stories of Samuel Beckett in relation to the recent developments in new materialism and material ecology. Beckett’s works insist on the distinctive signature of their author, joining together his trademark minimalist style with his persistence in retelling the same narrative situations over and over again. At the same time, hardly ever does Beckett cease to deprive his narrators of their voices, forcing them to stammer, to struggle with their speech, to be betrayed by it, or to remain completely mute. His hardly readable later short stories seem to abandon any form of the sentient narrator in favour of treating language as self-sufficient matter his abstract spaces consist of, albeit in a manner different from that adopted by the concrete literature. These circumstances interestingly correspond to Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s notion of storied matter which emphasises the textual capacities of non-human actors, blurs human and non-human readerships/authorships, and affirms the narratives embedded in the material, understood – after Jane Bennett – as the realm of vibrant entities. In my reading, I analyse how these concepts might allow us to rethink those “materialist works” of Beckett and the possible non-human agencies they are entangled in.

JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY ESSAYS AND STUDIES XXXII, 2017

Nasleđe, volume XII, issue 30, 2015

The aim of this paper is to interpret Samuel Beckett's novel The Unnamable inside the framework of poststructuralist criticism, primarily that of Jacques Derrida. The first part of the paper is dedicated to exploring Beckett's specific, bilingual situation in relation to how The Unnamable is narratively constructed. The main analysis focuses on the novel's narrative structure as a process of endless discursive deconstruction of the narrator's self, which, nevertheless, continuously aspires toward that end, toward silence. Special emphasis is placed on the analysis of the discursive treatment of the body, narratively positioned as the cultural product and physical setting of such discourse, but also as an insurmountable obstacle in the process of self-deconstruction, which can only go so far. We come to the conclusion that it is via The Unnamable's stream-of-consciousness narration and its attempted dissolution of the self, established in the Western metaphysical mindset, that Beckett most radically criticized the ideological conception of identity.

Samuel Beckett and the 'State' of Ireland, ed. Alan Graham and Scott Hamilton (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars’ Publishing), 2017

Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, 2015

Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui: "Beginning of the Murmur": Archival Pre-Texts and Other Sources, 2015

Beckett’s four nouvelles parody Romantic affinities between human subjectivity and landscape. Settings become fragmented, de-anthropomorphized and text-like. Since it is impossible to project one’s inner states onto landscape, communication with one’s surroundings is achievable only through idiosyncrasies of habitation: for instance the odd manner in which Beckett’s narrators occupy taxicabs, rooms, sidewalks, boats, and nautical capstans. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau argues that individuals re-appropriate socially organized spaces by “poaching” (braconnage). Such tactics are at play, too, when Beckett’s narrators transform ordinary objects, becoming “poets of their own acts” as their “errant” trajectories subversively remake social space.