Announced this week is a new publication from the Bloomsbury imprint. Taking its cue from contemporary developments in Beckett scholarship Beckett and Nature, we are told is ‘focused on ecocriticism, posthumanism, and the Anthropocene, going beyond them into a questioning of the very concepts of “Nature” and “the natural.” It examines one of the most unthought ontological dimensions of literature and life: that symbolic space, deemed natural or part of Nature, appears necessary and undeniable and, therefore, impossible to be deconstructed. In doing so, the authors show that, in fact, this space takes on many shapes, recognizing three “natural” dimensions criticized by Beckett: bodies, worlds, and literatures’.
The volume is co-edited by renowned scholars Charles Clements, Eleanor Green and James Martell, and features contributions from a wide and varied list of current scholars (see list of contents below]. Full details here
Part I. Natural Bodies
1. Mother Remains: Beckett’s autour Function and the Ecological (Jonathan Basile, University of British Columbia, Canada)
2. Nonrelational Literature and Immanent Metaphysics: What Spinoza’s Nature Has to Say About Beckett’s Form (Charles Clements, Tufts University, USA)
3. “For the space of an instant”: Beckett on the Subject of Thought (Bryan Counter, Framingham State University, USA)
4. Enough Is Too Much: Reading Gender through Flowers in Beckett (Eleanor Green, University of Manchester, UK)
5. Clinical Olfactory Environment Shapes Care Relationships in Samuel Beckett’s Murphy and Sam Thompson’s Jott. (Swati Joshi, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, India)
Part II. Natural Worlds
6. Breathing Human within Breathless Nature: Waiting for Godot in Pakistan (Saeed Muhammad Nasir, Emerson University Multan, Pakistan)
7. Samuel Beckett’s Neo-Biomorphic Playlet Breath (1969) Sets the Stage for the Pirana (Swati Joshi, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, India)
8. Foreseeing and Foresaying the Buddhist Unborn beyond Birth and Death in Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said (Asijit Datta, Deemed University, India)
9. Adorno’s Dialectic of Natural Beauty and Beckett’s Not I (Justin Neville Kaushall, Independent Scholar, UK)
10. The Inanimate Agency: An Object-Oriented Ontological Reading of Beckett’s Endgame and Its Anti-Anthropocentric Implications (Mehmet Zeki Giritli, Koç University, Turkey)
Part III. Natural Literatures
11. Beckett’s Foiled Mimesis is/in Nature (James Martell, Lyon College, USA)
12. Beckett and the Scream of Nature (Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania, USA)
13. “Everything oozes”: On Mud and Molebane in Beckett’s Dystopian Landscapes (Stanley E. Gontarski, Florida State University, USA)
14. Denaturing and Renaturing: Samuel Beckett’s Reception in Martin McDonagh’s Cinema (Jack Dudley, Mount St. Mary’s University, USA)
The Samuel Beckett Society 