Beckett and Dialectics: Be it Something or Nothing - Hardcover

Eva Ruda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1350136832 ISBN 13: 9781350136830

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

Synopsis

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 Becketts 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.

About this title

About the Author

Eva Ruda is a Visiting Assistant at the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences (Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures) at Yale University, USA. She is also a fellow at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School, Freie Universitat Berlin, Germany and a doctoral candidate at the Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, Germany.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350136832
• ISBN 13: 9781350136830
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256