Samuel Beckett and Catastrophe

Michiko Tsushima is a Professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Japan. She has published a number of articles on modern literature and contemporary thought including articles on Beckett and Arendt. She is the author of ‘“The Skin of Words”: Trauma and Skin in Watt’ in Samuel Beckett and trauma (2018) co-edited by Mariko Hori Tanaka and Yoshiki Tajiri. She published Hannah Arendt: Reconciling Ourselves to the World (in Japanese, 2016). Her articles on Beckett include ‘The Appearance of the Human at the Limit of Representation: Beckett and Pain in the Experience of Language’ in Samuel Beckett and Pain (2012) and ‘“Memory is the Belly of the Mind”: Augustine’s Concept of Memory in Beckett’ in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui (2008). She also published The Space of Vacillation: The Experience of Language in Beckett, Blanchot, and Heidegger (2003).Yoshiki Tajiri is Professor at the University of Tokyo, Japan. He has published extensively on modernism in English literature, Samuel Beckett, J. M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Yukio Mishima and other authors. He has edited Samuel Beckett and trauma (2018) and Samuel Beckett and Pain (2012) with Mariko Hori Tanaka and Michiko Tsushima, and published Beckett and Company (in Japanese, 2009) and Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Senses in Modernism (Palgrave, 2007). He has co-translated James Knowlson’s biography of Beckett, Damned to Fame, and James & Elizabeth Knowlson’s Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett. He is also the translator of Beckett’s first novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Mariko Hori Tanaka is Professor at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan. She has published various articles on Samuel Beckett and other playwrights.She co-edited Beckett’s Voices / Voicing Beckett (2021) with Laurens De Vos and Nicholas E. Johnson, Influencing Beckett / Beckett Influencing (2020) with Anita Rákóczy and Nicholas E. Johnson and two collections of essays on Beckett with Yoshiki Tajiri and Michiko Tsushima. She authored two books on Beckett in Japanese; Revised Versions of Waiting for Godot: Beckett as Director (2017) for which she was awarded the 28th Yoshida Hidekazu Prize (given to the best critical essay in the field of art, music, architecture, film and theatre published within a year) and Beckett Pilgrimage (2007).

• 1. Introduction.- Part I: Catastrophe and Aesthetic Creation.- 2. Tickling your catastrophe, or Beckett’s Laughing Antistrophe.- 3. The Not-all Catastrophe in Ill Seen Ill Said / Mal vu mal dit and ‘Comment dire’ / ‘what is the word’ by Samuel Beckett.- 4. Beckett’s Grey and the Temporality of Afterness.- 5. Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophic Synthesis between Leibniz and Schopenhauer.- Part II: Catastrophes in History.- 6. Beckett’s Sense of History in the Age of Catastrophe.- 7. Imagination’s Dead: Beckett’s Catastrophic Realism.- 8. Catastrophe and Everyday Life in Samuel Beckett.- Part III: Ecological Catastrophe and the Role of Art.- 9. Slow Violence and Slow Going: Encountering Beckett in the Time of Climate Catastrophe.- 10. A Feminist Counter-apocalyptic Interpretation of Precarity: Reading Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe in the Post-catastrophe Age.- 11. Gestures of Helpless Compassion: Beckett’s Eco-poetics of Extinction.