Table Of ContentNEW DIRECTIONS IN IRISH AND
IRISH AMERICAN LITERATURE
Beckett
and Politics
Edited by William Davies · Helen Bailey
New Directions in Irish and Irish American
Literature
Series Editors
Claire A. Culleton
Department of English
Kent State University
Kent, OH, USA
Kelly Matthews
Department of English
Framingham State University
Framingham, MA, USA
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature promotes fresh
scholarship that explores models of Irish and Irish American identity and
examinesissuesthataddressandshapethecontoursofIrishnessandworks
thatinvestigatethefluid,shifting,andsometimesmultivalentdisciplineof
Irish Studies. Politics, the academy, gender, and Irish and Irish American
culture, among other things, have not only inspired but affected recent
scholarship centered on Irish and Irish American literature. The series’s
focusonIrishandIrishAmericanliteratureandculturecontributestoour
twenty-first century understanding of Ireland, America, Irish Americans,
and the creative, intellectual, and theoretical spaces between.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14747
·
William Davies Helen Bailey
Editors
Beckett and Politics
Editors
William Davies Helen Bailey
University of Reading Loughborough College of Further
Reading, UK and Higher Education
Loughborough, UK
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature
ISBN 978-3-030-47109-5 ISBN 978-3-030-47110-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1
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Acknowledgements
A volume such as this is only made possible by the hard work, patience
and enthusiasm of its contributors. Our first and foremost thanks are to
them. Many of the authors attended or contributed to the “Beckett and
Politics” conference held at the University of Reading in 2016, which
sparked the debates that drove this project, and we thank all those who
havebeenwithusfromtheconferencethroughtothebook’scompletion,
as well as those scholars who have joined us through invitation along the
way. Special thanks to Niamh M. Bowe, Michela Bariselli and Antonio
Gambacortafortheirworkinco-organisingtheevent,andtotheUniver-
sity of Reading’s Samuel Beckett Research Centre for their institutional
support and guidance.
WethankthestaffatPalgraveMacmillanfortheirsupportandinterest
in the project, and for guiding the project through the editorial process.
Thanksalsototheanonymouspeer-reviewreadersfortheirinsightfuland
constructive comments on the volume, and to Hannah Simpson for her
thorough and helpful feedback on the volume’s introduction.
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Helen Bailey and William Davies
Part I Beckett & Language Politics: Editors’ Preface
2 The Politics of Forms in Beckett’s Writing 25
Nadia Louar
3 Beckett, Contradiction and a Textual Politics
of Change 39
Arka Chattopadhyay
4 “Made of Words”: Beckett and the Politics
of Language 55
Alan Graham
5 “First the Place, Then I’ll Find Me in It”:
The Unnamable’s Pronouns and the Politics
of Confinement 69
James Little
vii
viii CONTENTS
Part II Beckett & Biopolitics: Editors’ Preface
6 Tweaking Misogyny or Misogyny Twisted: Beckett’s
Take on “Aristotle and Phyllis” in Happy Days 91
Kumiko Kiuchi
7 Insufferable Maternity and Motherhood in
“First Love” 107
Brenda O’Connell
8 Beckett, Biopolitics and the Problem of Life 123
Marc Farrant
9 Beckett’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young
“Post-War Degenerate” 139
Giovanna Vincenti
10 Waiting for Godot and the Fascist Aesthetics
of the Body 155
Hannah Simpson
Part III Beckett & Geopolitics: Editors’ Preface
11 Political Theatre and the Beckett Problem 177
Emilie Morin
12 “The Air Is Full of Our Cries”: Staging Godot During
Apartheid South Africa 195
Matthew McFrederick
13 Samuel Beckett’s Nominalist Politics and the Pitfalls
of ‘Presentism’ 213
Matthew Feldman
14 Samuel Beckett’s Subaltern Figures 231
Brendan Dowling
CONTENTS ix
15 The Big House in the Suburbs: Home Thoughts
from Abroad in Watt 249
Feargal Whelan
16 Beckett and the Politics of Empathy in Site-Specific
Theatre 263
Niamh M. Bowe
17 Towards a Modernism with Meaning: Beckett’s
Refugees 281
Rodney Sharkey
18 Afterword 301
Peter Boxall
Index 313
Notes on Contributors
Helen Bailey is an independent scholar and works as an Access to
HE tutor at Loughborough College of Further and Higher Educa-
tion. Her publications appear in various journals and books, including
The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary English and Irish Poetry (2013),
SamuelBeckettToday/Aujourd’hui (2019)andTheRoutledgeCompanion
toMusicandModernLiterature (forthcoming).Sheiscurrentlypreparing
a book on Beckett, music and spirituality.
Niamh M. Bowe is an early career researcher and currently works in
academic publishing. She completed her AHRC-funded doctoral project
on the use of empathy and abstraction in Samuel Beckett’s later dramatic
work using the Samuel Beckett Collection at the University of Reading.
Her research focuses on political theatre, empathy theory and Irish
studies.
Peter Boxall isProfessorofEnglishattheUniversityofSussex.Hislatest
book is The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial
Life (2020). Earlier books include Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing
in the Wake of Modernism (2009) and The Value of the Novel (2015). He
haseditedseveralcollections,includingBeckett/Aesthetics/Politics (2000),
an edition of Beckett’s Malone Dies (2010), The Cambridge Companion
to British Fiction, 1980–2018 (2019) and the bestselling 1001 Books You
Must Read before You Die (2012). He is editor of Textual Practice and
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