Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett's Short Prose - Paperback

by Jonathan Boulter (Author)

A reading of the philosophical idea of world as it relates to the posthuman subject in Beckett's short prose

Jonathan Boulter offers the reader a way of understanding Beckett's presentation of the human, more precisely, posthuman, subject in his short prose. These texts are notoriously difficult yet utterly compelling. This compelling difficulty arises from Beckett's radical dismantling of the idea of the human. His short texts offer instead an image of a being who may be posthumous, or ultimately beyond categories of life and death. And yet, despite this dismantling, the narrators of these texts still find themselves placed within material, recognisable, spaces. This book explores what the idea of 'world' can mean to a subject who appears to have moved into a material, even ecological, space that is beyond categories of life and death, being and world.

Key Features:

• Provides a philosophical reading of Samuel Beckett
• Rethinks Beckett in relation to the posthuman
• Contributes to a relatively ignored aspect of Samuel Beckett's writing, the short prose

Front Jacket

A reading of the philosophical idea of world as it relates to the posthuman subject in Beckett's short prose Jonathan Boulter offers the reader a way of understanding Beckett's presentation of the posthuman subject in his short prose. These texts are utterly compelling yet notoriously difficult because of Beckett's radical dismantling of the idea of the human. They offer an image of a being who may be posthumous, or at least existing in a state of nostalgia for what has been lost, yet the narrators still find themselves placed within material, recognisable, spaces. This book explores what the idea of 'world' can mean to a subject who appears to have moved into a material, even ecological, space that is beyond categories of life and death, being and world. Jonathan Boulter is Professor of English at Western University.

Author Biography

Jonathan Boulter is Professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. His publications include: Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett's Short Prose (Edinburgh UP, 2019), Parables of the Posthuman: Digital Realities, Gaming, and the Player Experience (Wayne State UP, 2015) and Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma, History and Memory in the Contemporary Novel (Continuum, 2011).