Samuel Beckett

Dr Laura Salisbury is RCUK Research Fellow in Science, Technology, and Culture at Birkbeck, University of London. She works on modernist and contemporary literature and on the relationship between science, philosophy and culture. Her major new research project is a study of the relationship between neurological conceptions of language, modernism, and modernity.

• Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction; Human Humour; Fun and Trembling; 'That's not moving. That's moving'; Laughing Matters; Chapter One. Critical Joking: The Early Prose; Superiority, Sarcasm, Scholarship; The Loutishness of Learning; Diminishing Laughing Returns; Art vs. Book-Keeping; S/M: Scholarship and Mimicry; Critical Timing; Chapter Two. Gagging in the Trilogy; Gagging for It; Partial Incorporation; An Obligation to Express; Tiring Desire; Toilet Training, Resistant Material; Nihil in Intellectu; Chapter Three. Power Playing in Endgame; Perhaps; Unhappiness: Nothing Funnier; Playing for Time; The Play of the Audience; Just Play; Dialectics at a Standstill; Chapter Four. Comic Tremors: The Late Prose; Embers and Ashes; Imagination at Wit's End; Ill Saying, Ill Said; Ill Seeing; Chapter Five. Slapstick Echoes: The Late Plays; Limping Gags; Deadpan Demands; 'Kindly Tune Accordingly'; 'Like Something out of Beckett'; Conclusion; Works Cited.

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