Beckett and Embodiment

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).

• AbbreviationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Embodied Agency: Towards an Ecology of the Subject1. From Cartesian Ruins: Rocking Chair Phenomenology2. Short-Circuited Rationalism, or How the Body Means3. From Dialectics to Infinity: Life Cycles in Molloy, Malone Dies and Endgame4. Radical Indecision: Aporia and Embodied Agency in The Unnamable5. Style and the Violence of Passivity: How It Is6. Compulsive Bodies, Creative Bodies: Quad7. The Body and Creation: Worstward Ho8. Conclusion: Embedded in the World: Beckett, Late Modernism, Earth-Body ArtIndex

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.