Pilgrim''s Gress: The Beckett Walk

Samuel Beckett's literary pedestrianism transitions from Romanticism and Edwardian autonomy to mutuality and transitory being. The walk serves as a motif, rhythm, compositional principle, and ontology. This Element examines the Beckett walk using cognitive, materialities, environmental, infrastructure, cultural, and performance studies.

List of contents

1. Introduction; 2. Romantic and Victorian traces; 3. Edwardian tramping; 4. Walking cure; 5. Flânerie, automatism and dérive; 6. Closed space and open road; 7. Thinking on one's feet; 8. 'These wanderings'; 9. Walking myth and allegory; 10. 'Pure and mere gress'; Bibliographies.

Summary

Walking is a determining trope and structure in Samuel Beckett's oeuvre, furnishing a textual and performance figure, a framing device, and a material practice. The walk begins as a motif, becomes a rhythm, expands into a compositional principle, and culminates in an ontology -- a defining means by which his characters are cognitively embodied and by which meaning is grounded. The book contends that Beckett's literary pedestrianism involve passage from an evasive and narcissistic vestige of Romanticism and a solipsistic variation on Edwardian autonomy to an embrace of mutuality and transitory being: life not as a network of stations so much as a meshwork of ways, peripatetic coming and going as the basis of human possibility and ethical value. The study examines the Beckett walk with reference to, for instance, cognitive theory, materialities theory, environmental studies, infrastructure theory, cultural and literary history, speech-act theory, mobility studies and performance studies.

Product details

• Authors: Andre Furlani, Andre (Concordia University Furlani, Andre (Concordia University) Furlani, Furlani Andre
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.12.2024
• EAN: 9781009507462
• ISBN: 978-1-0-0950746-2
• No. of pages: 86
• Series: Elements in Beckett Studies
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Walking, hiking, trekking, Horror & ghost stories, Occult fiction, Literary studies: plays & playwrights, Literary studies: plays and playwrights, Street fiction / urban fiction