The latest in the series Cambridge Elements in Beckett Studies has just become available. Beckett and Derrida is the work of renowned scholar James Martell who teaches at Lyon College in Arkansas. What promises to be a welcome addition to the field this Element ‘proposes a systematic reading of [the two writers’] main points of connection’ by ‘taking into consideration their shared historical and personal contexts as writers whose main language of expression was ‘adopted’ or ‘imposed”. We are told that it will focus ‘on their engagement with the intricacies of beginnings and origins, on genetic grounds or surfaces analogous to the Platonic khôra, and on their similar critiques of the aporias of sovereignty, [exposing] the reasons why multiple readers, like Coetzee, consider Derridean deconstruction a philosophical mirror of Beckett’s literary achievements’.
Following the usual practice of the Elements series, this volume is available to download for free until 26 December 2024.
The Samuel Beckett Society 