Published in association with the seminar series of the same name held by the University of Oxford, "Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies" presents the best new scholarship addressing the sources, development and ongoing influence of Samuel Beckett's work. Edited by convenors Dr Peter Fifield and Dr David Addyman, the volume presents ten research essays by leading international scholars ranging across Beckett's work, opening up new avenues of enquiry and association for scholars, students and readers of Beckett's work.Among the subjects covered the volume includes studies of: -Beckett and the influence of new media 1956-1960-the influence of silent film on Beckett's work-death, loss and Ireland in Beckett's drama - tracing Irish references in Beckett's plays from the 1950s and 1960s, including" Endgame," "All That Fall," " Krapp's Last Tape" and "Eh Joe"-a consideration of Beckett's theatrical notebooks and annotated copies of his plays which provide a unique insight into his attitude toward the staging of his plays, the ways he himself interpreted his texts and approached theatrical practice.-the French text of the novel "Mercier et Camier," which both biographically and aesthetically appeared at a very significant moment in Beckett's career and indicates a crucial development in his writing-the matter of tone in Beckett's drama, offering a new reading of the ways in which this elusive property emerges and can be read in the relationship between published text, canon and performance

This book is the first major study of the theme of misanthropy, its history, arguments both for and against it, and its significance for us today. Misanthropy is not strictly a philosophy. It is an inconsistent thought, and so has often been mocked. But from Timon of Athens to Motoerhead it has had a very long life, vast historical purchase and is seemingly indomitable and unignorable. Human beings have always nursed a profound distrust of who and what they are. This book does not seek to rationalize that distrust, but asks how far misanthropy might have a reason on its side, if a confused reason. There are obvious arguments against misanthropy. It is often born of a hatred of physical being. It can be historically explained. It particularly appears in undemocratic cultures. But what of the misanthropy of terminally defeated and disempowered peoples? Or born of progressivisms? Or the misanthropy that quarrels with specious or easy positivities (from Pelagius to Leibniz to the corporate cheer of contemporary `total capital`)? From the Greek Cynics to Roman satire, St Augustine to Jacobean drama, the misanthropy of the French Ancien Regime to Swift, Smollett and Johnson, Hobbes, Schopenhauer and Rousseau, from the Irish and American misanthropic traditions to modern women`s misanthropy, the book explores such questions. It ends with a debate about contemporary culture that ranges from the `dark radicalisms`, queer misanthropy, posthumanism and eco-misanthropy to Houellebecq, punk rock and gangsta rap.

In this book Andrew Gibson argues that the aesthetic practices that make up Ulysses are responses to the colonial history of Ireland and the colonial politics of Irish culture.

Beckett and Badiou offers a provocative new reading of Samuel Beckett's work on the basis of a full, critical account of the thought of Alain Badiou. Badiou is the most eminent of contemporary French philosophers. His devotion to Beckett's work has been lifelong. Yet for Badiou philosophy must be integrally affirmative, whilst Beckett apparently commits his art to a work of negation. Beckett and Badiou explores the coherences, contradictions, and extreme complexities of the intellectual relationship between the two oeuvres. It examines Badiou's philosophy of being, the event, truth, and the subject and the importance of mathematics within his system. It considers the major features of his politics, ethics, and aesthetics and provides an explanation, interpretation, critique, and radical revision of his work on Beckett. It argues that, once revised, Badiou's version of Beckett offers an extraordinarily powerful tool for understanding his work.
Badiou and Beckett are instances of a vestigial or melancholic modernism; that is, in the teeth of a contemporary culture that dreams ever more ambitiously of plenitude, they commit themselves to a rigorous concept of limit and intermittency. Truth and value are occasional and rare. It is seldom that the chance event arrives to disturb the inertia of the world. For Badiou, however, it is the event and its consequences alone that matter. Beckett rather insists on the common experience of intermittency as destitution. His art is a series of limit-figures, exquisitely subtle and nuanced forms for a world whose state of seemingly rigid paralysis is also always volatile, delicately balanced.

Exploring the possibility of a postmodern ethics of reading, this text sets out to demonstrate that postmodern theory has actually made possible an ethical discourse around fiction. Each chapter elaborates and discusses a particular aspect of Levinas thought and raises questions for that thought and its bearing on the novel, and also contains detailed analyses of particular texts.

In Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel Andrew Gibson sets out to demonstrate that postmodern theory has actually made possible an ethical discourse around fiction.
Each chapter elaborates and discusses a particular aspect of Levinas' thought and raises questions for that thought and its bearing on the novel. It also contains detailed analyses of particular texts. Part of the book's originality is its concentration on a range of modernist and postmodern novels which have seldom if ever served as the basis for a larger ethical theory of fiction.
Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel discusses among others the writings of Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Jane Austen, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust and Salman Rushdie.

From their decisive emergence in the late eighteenth century, modernity and modern politics were long haunted by irony and paradox. Ours, however, is the age of the implosion of modernity. Modernity has degenerated into self-parody. The polarities that an ironic grasp of it could potentially always hold in tension are finally collapsing into each other. In Modernity and the Political Fix, Andrew Gibson tells the relevant story and asks what aspects of modern politics we might want to salvage and preserve and within what structure we might continue thinking about them. His answer is that these questions call for the isolation of a particular set of concepts; that, rightly positioned in relation to one another, the concepts amount to a political theology; that the very formulation of political temporality is therefore at stake; and that the thinking in question has been and is best represented in modern philosophy and art, above all, modern literature. Ranging through early modern and modern thought from Hobbes, Pascal and Leibniz to Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard to Foucault, Lacan, Badiou, Jambet and Ranciere, and in modern literature and art from Wordsworth and Byron to Goya and Wagner, Huysmans and Wilde, Joyce and Woolf, Joseph Roth, Vicki Baum, Gabriele Tergit and the Weimar novel, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell to R.S. Thomas and Norman Nicholson, Gibson seeks to compile a modern political aide-memoire, a treasury for a politics to come.

The book consists of seven essays exploring the relationship between Pound and Browning, Yeats, Ford, Lewis, Joyce, Eliot and American epic tradition. Each essay reconsiders and reassesses one aspect of the poet, his work and his literary connections in the light of fresh insight and new research.

Scholarly accounts of Joyce's early work have traditionally resorted to two historical keys to try to unlock it: a concept of the Dublin and Ireland in which he grew to adulthood as stagnant and backward, and an emphasis on 1904, the year of the supposedly crucial break in which Joyce quit Ireland for continental Europe and could begin his great modernist literary project. But modernist or no, Joyce's works are always about Ireland, and he remained vitally in touch with Irish historical developments throughout his life. This study aims to be the first comprehensive historicisation of Joyce's writings 1898-1915 in relation to the distinct phases and shifting currents of British-Irish history during the period. At the turn of the century, when a concept of `national resurgence' is much in the Irish air, in his earliest essays, Joyce meditates on art as an anti-colonial and emancipatory project that addresses questions of freedom and justice in its own distinctive way. His early essays produce a compelling declaration of a principle of autonomy at a specific historical moment in a colonial culture. However, successive historical events - the crises surrounding the Land Act, the United Irish League and Devolution, the election of 1906, the Third Home Rule Bill crisis - call the emancipatory project ever more sharply into question. Thus `the strong spirit' which Joyce had initially thought might transcend and even conquer the effects of history becomes indissolubly wedded to radical historical scepticism. Through Dubliners, Stephen Hero, the `Triestine Writings' and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Exiles, Joyce responds to his predicament by examining recent Irish history and the place of the intellectual and artist within it in a variety of extremely subtle and complex or, in Joycean terms, `labyrinthine' forms of writing.

The Ireland of Ulysses was still a part of Britain. This book is the first comprehensive, historical study of Joyce's great novel in the context of Anglo-Irish political and cultural relations in the period 1880-1920. The first forty years of Joyce's life also witnessed the emergence of what historians now call English cultural nationalism. This formation was perceptible in a wide range of different discourses. Ulysses engages with many of them. In doing so, it resists, transforms and works to transcend the effects of British rule in Ireland. The novel was written in the years leading up to Irish independence. It is powered by both a will to freedom and a will to justice. But the two do not always coincide, and Joyce does not place his art in the service of any extant political cause. His struggle for independence has its own distinctive mode. The result is a unique work of liberation--and revenge.
This eminently learned but lucidly written book transforms our understanding of Joyce's Ulysses. It does so by placing the novel firmly in the historical context of Anglo-Irish political and cultural relations in the period 1880-1920. Gibson argues that Ulysses is a great work of liberation that also takes a complex form of revenge on the colonizer's culture.

This book presents J. M. Coetzee's work as a complex, nuanced counterblast to contemporary, global, neoliberal economics and its societies. Not surprisingly, given his many years in South Africa and Australia, Coetzee writes from a `global-Southern' perspective. Drawing on a wealth of literature, philosophy, and theory, the book reads Coetzee's writings as a discreet, oblique but devastating engagement with neoliberal presumptions. It identifies and focuses on various key features of neoliberal culture: its obsession with self-enrichment, mastery, growth; its belief in plenitude, endless resources; its hubris and obsession with (self)-promotion; its desire for ease and easiness, `well-being', euphoria; its fetishization of managerial reason and the culture of security; its unrelenting positivity, its belief in illusory goods and trivial progressivisms. By contrast, Coetzee's writings explore the virtues of irony and self-reduction. He commits himself to difficulty, discomfort, patient and austere, if bleak, inquiry, rigorous questioning, and radical doubt. Destitution and failure come to look like a serious, dignified form of life and thought. The very tones of Coetzee's books run counter to those of our neoliberal democracies. They point in a different direction to an age that has gone astray.

From their decisive emergence in the late eighteenth century, modernity and modern politics were long haunted by irony and paradox. Ours, however, is the age of the implosion of modernity. Modernity has degenerated into self-parody. The polarities that an ironic grasp of it could potentially always hold in tension are finally collapsing into each other. In Modernity and the Political Fix, Andrew Gibson tells the relevant story and asks what aspects of modern politics we might want to salvage and preserve and within what structure we might continue thinking about them. His answer is that these questions call for the isolation of a particular set of concepts; that, rightly positioned in relation to one another, the concepts amount to a political theology; that the very formulation of political temporality is therefore at stake; and that the thinking in question has been and is best represented in modern philosophy and art, above all, modern literature. Ranging through early modern and modern thought from Hobbes, Pascal and Leibniz to Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard to Foucault, Lacan, Badiou, Jambet and Ranciere, and in modern literature and art from Wordsworth and Byron to Goya and Wagner, Huysmans and Wilde, Joyce and Woolf, Joseph Roth, Vicki Baum, Gabriele Tergit and the Weimar novel, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell to R.S. Thomas and Norman Nicholson, Gibson seeks to compile a modern political aide-memoire, a treasury for a politics to come.

Have you ever wanted a simpler life? Simpler relationships with partners, families, friends or at work? When you are stuck, would you like to find a simple and effective way to move forward? Would you like things to be different? Or to make a difference for others? Following on from the acclaimed 'What's Your URP?', Andrew Gibson combines elements of storytelling, networking, social capital, and a host of useful tools to help you take control of your life. The methods he shares will reduce the time and money you spend on unnecessary complexities, help you look for the simple and effective next steps, and make more of a difference for yourself and your network. This book will change the way you look at life. You will spend more time looking outwards at how you help others, and in turn, you will build a supportive network that will help you. You will spend less time worrying about what others think, and more time noticing the positives and the differences you and others are making. After you have read this book, you will enjoy a fresh perspective, and perhaps even a new path. Every journey starts with a small step, and this book will help you every step of the way.

"The Abandoned Ocean" offers an in-depth appraisal of United States maritime policy from the establishment of a merchant marine immediately after the Revolutionary War through radical industry transformations of the late twentieth century. In this sweeping analysis of federal policies that promote, regulate, protect, and subsidize American shipping in coastal and foreign trade, Andrew Gibson and Arthur Donovan also examine the closely related fortunes of the shipbuilding industry and the intertwined activities of the merchant and military navies. The authors consider why, since the middle of the nineteenth century, United States maritime policy has been so strikingly unsuccessful in achieving its stated goal of promoting a commercially viable merchant marine engaged in foreign trade.