Bowie, Beckett, and Being - The Art of Alienation

Addressing their shared passion for literature, art, and music, this book documents how Samuel Beckett and David Bowie produce extraordinarily empathetic creative outputs that reflect the experience and the effect of alienation. Through an exploration of their artistic practices, the study also illustrates how both artists articulate shared forms of human experience otherwise silenced by normative modes of representation. To liberate these experiences, Bowie and Beckett create alternative theatrical, musical, and philosophical spaces, which help frame the power relations of the psychological, verbal, and material places we inhabit. The result is that their work demonstrates how individuals are disciplined by the implicitly repressive social order of late capitalism, while, simultaneously, offering an informed political alternative. In making the injunctions of the social order apparent, Beckett and Bowie also transgress its terms, opening up new spaces beyond the conventional identities of family, nation, and gender, until both artists finally coalesce in the quantum space of the posthuman.

List of contents

Prologue "You're Not Alone"
1. On Methodology
2. Inside.Outside.Counterculture
3. The Philosophy of Alienation
4. The Aesthetics of Alienation
5. Interzone
6. Struggling Against the Straight
7. Alienation and Ruination
8. ON
9. Becoming Quantum
10. Beyond and Becoming: The Men Who Fled from Earth
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index

About the author

Rodney Sharkey is Professor of English at Weill Cornell Medicine, Qatar. His specialized fields of interest are in Anglo-Irish literature, critical theory, performance dynamics and popular culture. He publishes regularly in journals such as Modern Culture Reviews, Journal of Beckett Studies, Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness and Reconstruction.

Product details

• Authors: Rodney Sharkey
• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 18.09.2025
• EAN: 9781501391286
• ISBN: 978-1-5013-9128-6
• No. of pages: 256
• Illustrations: 2 bw illus
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Music > General, dictionaries; Individual composers & musicians, specific bands & groups, 20th Century, ART / Individual Artists / Monographs, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Pop Vocal, 20th century, c 1900 to c 1999, The self, ego, identity, personality, Psychology: the self, ego, identity, personality, Musicians, singers, bands and groups, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers