
Beckett and Embodiment
Body, Space, Agency
Amanda M. Dennis(Author)
Edinburgh University Press
Published on 31. August 2021
Book
Hardback
256 pages
978-1-4744-6299-0 (ISBN)
Description
This book argues that the abject, decrepit body in Beckett does not signal the impossibility of agency but demands its reconceptualisation. Analysing the representation of the body in relation to the environment in Beckett's work, the author interrogates the power to do and act. Separating dynamic interaction from willed intention, Amanda Dennis shows how Beckett's oeuvre refashions subjectivity in dialogue with a disintegrating environment. The book provides a phenomenological reading of Beckett to argue that sensation and embodiment support our interactions with our material world, enabling possibilities for embodied agency in collaboration with our physical and linguistic surroundings.
Reviews / Votes
Attending to the "meaning-making potential of the body in space," Amanda Dennis demonstrates the continuing value of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology for an understanding of Beckett's posthuman ecology. Beckett and Embodiment is a timely and important study written with a keen and critical intelligence. -- Professor Jonathan Boulter, Western UniversityMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 16 mm
Weight
540 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4744-6299-0 (9781474462990)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
05/2021
1st Edition
Edinburgh University Press
€21.49
Available for download

E-Book
05/2021
1st Edition
Edinburgh University Press
€21.49
Available for download
Person
Amanda M. Dennis is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the American University of Paris. She co-edited the recent volume Samuel Beckett and the Nonhuman (Brill, 2020), and her articles have appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature, the Journal of Beckett Studies and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, among other places. She has held fellowships and visiting lectureships in France, the US, the UK and Spain, and she is the author of the novel Her Here (Bellevue Literary Press, 2021).
Content
AbbreviationsAcknowledgements
Introduction: Embodied Agency: Towards an Ecology of the Subject
1. From Cartesian Ruins: Rocking Chair Phenomenology
2. Short-Circuited Rationalism, or How the Body Means
3. From Dialectics to Infinity: Life Cycles in Molloy, Malone Dies and Endgame
4. Radical Indecision: Aporia and Embodied Agency in The Unnamable
5. Style and the Violence of Passivity: How It Is
6. Compulsive Bodies, Creative Bodies: Quad
7. The Body and Creation: Worstward Ho
8. Conclusion: Embedded in the World: Beckett, Late Modernism, Earth-Body Art
Index
Introduction: Embodied Agency: Towards an Ecology of the Subject
1. From Cartesian Ruins: Rocking Chair Phenomenology
2. Short-Circuited Rationalism, or How the Body Means
3. From Dialectics to Infinity: Life Cycles in Molloy, Malone Dies and Endgame
4. Radical Indecision: Aporia and Embodied Agency in The Unnamable
5. Style and the Violence of Passivity: How It Is
6. Compulsive Bodies, Creative Bodies: Quad
7. The Body and Creation: Worstward Ho
8. Conclusion: Embedded in the World: Beckett, Late Modernism, Earth-Body Art
Index