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A reading of the philosophical idea of world as it relates to the posthuman subject in Beckett's short prose
Jonathan Boulter offers the reader a way of understanding Beckett's presentation of the posthuman subject in his short prose. These texts are utterly compelling yet notoriously difficult because of Beckett's radical dismantling of the idea of the human. They offer an image of a being who may be posthumous, or at least existing in a state of nostalgia for what has been lost, yet the narrators still find themselves placed within material, recognisable, spaces. This book explores what the idea of 'world' can mean to a subject who appears to have moved into a material, even ecological, space that is beyond categories of life and death, being and world.
Jonathan Boulter is Professor of English at Western University.
List of contents
Acknowledgments; Abbreviations; Introduction: Beckett, Heidegger, the World; 1. Homelessness: The Expelled, The Calmative, The End; 2. The Poverty of World: Texts for Nothing; 3. Spaces of Ruin: All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine, The Lost Ones, Ping, Lessness; 4. Space and Trauma: Fizzles; 5. Fables of Posthuman Space: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho; Conclusion: 'neither'; References; Index.
About the author
Jonathan Boulter is Professor of English at Western University, London, Ontario, Canada. He is the author of four previous books:
Parables of the Posthuman: Digital Realities, Gaming, and the Player Experience (Wayne State UP, 2015),
Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma, History and Memory in the Contemporary Novel (Continuum, 2011),
Samuel Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2008) and
Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of Samuel Beckett (University Press of Florida, 2001).
Summary
Jonathan Boulter offers the reader a way of understanding Beckett's presentation of the human, more precisely, posthuman, subject in his short prose.
