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The highly-anticipated, latest title in the Cambridge University Press ‘Elements in Beckett Studies’ series has just been released. Insufferable: Beckett, Gender and Sexuality, as its summary argues ‘rethinks the role of gender politics in the oeuvre, demonstrates Beckett’s historical importance in the development of the “antisocial thesis” in queer theory, and shows the work’s attachment to sexuality as temporarily consolatory but ultimately unbearable. The Beckett oeuvre might seem unpromising material for gender and sexuality studies, but this is exactly what makes it worth considering. This Element brings to Beckett questions that have emerged from gender, queer, and trans theory, engages with the history of feminism and sexuality studies, and develops a theoretical framework able to account for what we have previously overlooked, underplayed, and misinterpreted in Beckett. In the spirit of being “on the lookout for an elsewhere”, it makes a case for a queerly generative de-idealisation of Beckett as an object of critical study’.
The title’s author, Daniela Caselli, is Professor of modern literature at the University of Manchester. She is a former President of the Samuel Beckett Society and is a current member of the editorial board of the Journal of Beckett Studies. She has written on Beckett and Dante (Beckett’s Dantes. Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism, 2005), the role of manuscripts and the archive, Beckett’s reception in Italy, Beckett and Italian literature and Beckett and Leopardi, and edited Beckett and Nothing: Trying to Understand Beckett (2010; open access).
She is currently writing a book entitled The Modernist Child. The project has emerged from work on affect theory, gender and the child (Feminist Theory) and literary and sexual experimentalism in the interwar period (Cambridge Companion to American Gay and Lesbian Literature, edited by Scott Herring). ‘Attack of the Easter Bunnies’, a study of Walter Benjamin and childhood, with a focus on his Youth Hour radio programmes in the 1930s, can be found in Parallax (open access). The Wellcome Trust has funded new research on The Children’s Society Archives, which will be part of The Modernist Child.
The book can be downloaded here for free for a limited period.
The Samuel Beckett Society 