Samuel Beckett in Confinement The Politics of Closed Space

James Little

"The scope of this study will make it of interest to scholars across many disciplines. [...] What Beckett in Confinement contributes to the ongoing discussion of a Beckettian politics is an understanding of how the confined spaces of his oeuvre equip readers and audiences with a set of cognitive and conceptual tools for an ethical and political analysis of closed space. Little argues that the politics of Beckett’s spatial aesthetic is its resistance to the representation of enclosed spaces on the terms of the state, sidestepping hermeneutic closure to open up a multiplicity of closed spaces to socio- political critique. [...] It is a powerful argument for seeing Beckett’s oeuvre as a formal engagement with politics that places the ethical question foremost, with the spatial forms of his work shaped by a relation to the inalienable alterity of confinement that retains, rather than assimilates, its difference." The Modernist Review

Enter code SBIC35 on bloomsbury.com for a 35% discount* Hardback | 256 pp | May 2020 | 9781350112322 | £85.00 £55.25

Confinement appears repeatedly in Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre – from the asylums central to Murphy and Watt to the images of confinement that shape plays such as Waiting for Godot and Endgame. Drawing on spatial theory and new archival research, Beckett in Confinement explores these recurring concepts of closed space to cast new light on the ethical and political dimensions of Beckett’s work. Covering the full range of Beckett’s writing career, including two plays he completed for prisoners, Catastrophe and the unpublished ‘Mongrel Mime’, the book shows how this engagement with the ethics of representing prisons and asylums stands at the heart of Beckett’s poetics.

James Little is a postdoctoral researcher at Charles University, Prague and Visiting Professor at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Beckett’s Spatial Politics 1 Images of Confinement: Proust, Dream of Fair to Middling Women 2 The Ethics of Writing Confinement: ‘Dante and the Lobster’, ‘Fingal’, Murphy 3 ‘Vaguening’ Confinement: Watt 4 ‘Undoing’ Confinement: ‘The End’, ‘The Expelled’, Molloy, Malone Dies 5 Political Pentimenti: Waiting for Godot, Endgame 6 Learning to Say ‘Not I’: The Unnamable 7 Redoing Not I in ‘Non-A’ 8 ‘The Limits of Interpretation’: Imagination Dead Imagine, All Strange Away 9 The ‘Anethics’ of Staging Confinement: ‘Mongrel Mime’, Catastrophe Conclusion: ‘Mongrel’ Space

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