The dozen essays brought together here, alongside a newly-written introduction, contextualize and exemplify the recent 'empirical turn' in Beckett studies. Characterized, above all, by recourse to manuscript materials in constructing revisionist interpretations, this approach has helped to transform the study of Samuel Beckett over the past generation. In addition to focusing upon Beckett's early immersion in philosophy and psychology, other chapters similarly analyze his later collaboration with the BBC through the lens of literary history. Falsifying Beckett thus offers new readings of Beckett by returning to his archive of notebooks, letters, and drafts. In reassessing key aspects of his development as one of the 20th century's leading artists, this collection is of interest to all students of Beckett's writing as well as ' historicist' scholars and critics of modernism more generally.

The dozen essays brought together here, alongside a newly-written introduction, contextualize and exemplify the recent 'empirical turn' in Beckett studies. Characterized, above all, by recourse to manuscript materials in constructing revisionist interpretations, this approach has helped to transform the study of Samuel Beckett over the past generation. In addition to focusing upon Beckett's early immersion in philosophy and psychology, other chapters similarly analyze his later collaboration with the BBC through the lens of literary history. Falsifying Beckett thus offers new readings of Beckett by returning to his archive of notebooks, letters, and drafts. In reassessing key aspects of his development as one of the 20th century's leading artists, this collection is of interest to all students of Beckett's writing as well as 'historicist' scholars and critics of modernism more generally.

The Irish writer and Nobel Prize winner, Samuel Beckett, assembled for himself a history of western philosophy during the 1930s, just at the point at which his first novel, Murphy, was coming together. The 'Philosophy Notes', together with related notes taken at that time about St. Augustine, thereafter provided Beckett with a store of knowledge, but also with phrases and images, which he took up in the major work that won him international and enduring fame, from the dramas Waiting for Godot and Endgame, through to the late prose works Worstward Ho and Stirrings Still. This edition presents, for the first time, Beckett's full 'Philosophy Notes', which constitute his most extensive unpublished text. The Notes display Beckett's own interests and emphases within the history of western philosophy, from the pre-Socratic Greeks onwards, together with more familiar figures in the study of his work, such as Descartes, Leibnitz, and Geulincx. Here we see Beckett's original thoughts on all of these figures for the first time. The Notes also, tellingly and often comically, display Beckett's impatience with many aspects of philosophy, such as its anthropological or anthropomorphic bias, or the idealism of the Enlightenment and Kant. The Edition contains an extensive Introduction, outlining the origin of Beckett's Notes, his major sources and approach to them, the historical context for his view of philosophy, and the significance of Beckett's 'Philosophy Notes' within his mature writings. The many footnotes then suggest ways in which particular aspects of the philosophy narrated here by Beckett suggest fresh insights into those later writings—the images, but also the creative impulses, behind some of his most famous texts. This Edition, further, raises larger questions about, and perspectives upon, the relation between philosophy and literature in the twentieth century and beyond.

For a long time, analysis of the work of Samuel Beckett has been dominated by existentialist and post-structuralist interpretations. This new volume instead raises the question of how to understand Beckett via the dialectics underpinning his work. The different chapters explore how Beckett exposes and challenges essential dialectical concepts such as objectivity, subjectivity, exteriority, interiority, immanence, transcendence, and most crucially: negativity. With contributions from prominent scholars such as Alain Badiou, Mladen Dolar, and Rebecca Comay, Beckett and Dialectics not only sheds new light on how Beckett investigates the shapes, types, and forms of negation – as in the all-pervasive figures of 'nothing', 'no', 'null', and 'not' – but also examines how several phenomena that occur throughout Beckett's work are structured in their use of negativity. These include the relationships between voice and silence, space and void, movement and stasis, the finite and the infinite and repetition and transformation. This original analysis lends an important new perspective to Beckett studies, and even more fundamentally, to dialectics itself.

This collection of essays reveals the extent to which politics is fundamental to our understanding of Samuel Beckett’s life and writing. Bringing together internationally established and emerging scholars, Beckett and Politics considers Beckett’s work as it relates to three broad areas of political discourse: language politics, biopolitics and geopolitics. Through a range of critical approaches, including performance studies, political theory, gender theory, historicizing approaches and language theory, the book demonstrates how politics is more than just another thematic lens: it is fundamentally and structurally intrinsic to Beckett’s life, his texts and subsequent interpretations of them. This important collection of essays demonstrates that Beckett’s work is not only ripe for political engagement, but also contains significant opportunities for understanding and illuminating the broader relationships between literature, culture and politics.

Despite the steady rise in adaptations of Samuel Beckett’s work across the world following the author’s death in 1989, Beckett’s afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to this creative phenomenon. The collection employs interrelated concepts of adaptation, remediation and appropriation to reflect on Beckett’s own evolving approach to crossing genre boundaries and to analyse the ways in which contemporary artists across different media and diverse cultural contexts – including the UK, Europe, the USA and Latin America – continue to engage with Beckett. The book offers fresh insights into how his work has kept inspiring both practitioners and audiences in the twenty-first century, operating through methodologies and approaches that aim to facilitate and establish the study of modern-day adaptations, not just of Beckett but other (multimedia) authors as well.

The first sustained exploration of aporia as a vital, subversive, and productive figure within Beckett's prose and theatre.