This collection of essays was born from a wish to show to a wider audience how exciting and productive Samuel Beckett scholarship has become, at a time when there are more essays and books written about Beckett than about any key modernist authors like Joyce and Woolf. This volume contains numerous essays on Beckett that the Journal of Modern Literature has published in the last decade. Their enduring quality proves that Beckett's oeuvre has maintained its appeal today because it attracts original scholars who are also interested in issues like philosophy, psychoanalysis, ethics, contemporary history, and literary theory.
Jean-Michel Rabate, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania, coeditor of the Journal of Modern Literature, cofounder and senior curator of the Slought Foundation, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Rabate is the author or editor of more than forty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary theory. Recent monographs include Rust (2018), Kafka L.O.L. (2018), Rire au Soleil (2019), Beckett and Sade (2020), Rires Prodigues: Rire et jouissance chez Marx, Freud et Kafka (2021), James Joyce, Heretique et Prodigue (2022), and Lacan l'irritant (2023).
Introduction, by Jean-Michel Rabate Nothing is Impossible: Bergson, Beckett, and the Pursuit of the Naught, by Jeremy Colangelo Beckettian Habit and Deictic Exhaustion, by Shuta Kiba Glitches in Logic in Beckett's Watt: Toward a Sensory Poetics, by Amanda M. Dennis Beckett's Vessels and the Animation of Containers, by Hunter Dukes Blanchot in Infinite Conversation(s) with Beckett, by Arleen Ionescu Beckett, Painting and the Question of "the human", by Kevin Brazil Art of Impoverishment: Beckett and arte povera, by Erika Mihalycsa Beckett, War Memory, and the State of Exception, by Emilie Morin Putting the Impossible to Work: Beckettian Afterlife and the Posthuman Future of Humanity, by Ruben Borg Dogging the Subject: Samuel Beckett, Emmanuel Levinas, and Posthumanistic Ethics, by Karalyn Kendall-Morwick A Defense of Wretchedness: Molloy and Humiliation, by Rick De Villiers Who Hobbles after the Subject: Parables of Writing in The Third Policeman and Molloy, by Yael Levin " 'Tis my muse will have it so": Four Dimensions of Scatology in Molloy, by Andrew G. Christensen "Strange laughter": Post-Gothic Questions of Laughter and the Human in Samuel Beckett's Work, by Hannah Simpson The Illusionless: Adorno and the Afterlife of Laughter in How It Is, by Michelle Rada
