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Written in clear, accessible language, this guide challenges and
encourages students to grapple with the difficult ideas and
questions posed by Beckett's texts.Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) is
one of the most important twentieth century writers, seen as both a
modernist and postmodernist, his work has influenced generations of
playwrights, novelists and poets. Despite his notorious difficulty,
Beckett famously refused to offer his readers any help in
interpreting his work. Beckett's texts examine key
philosophical-humanist questions but his writing is challenging,
perplexing and often intimidating for readers. This guide offers
students reading Beckett a clear starting point from which to
confront some of the most difficult plays and novels produced in
the twentieth century, texts which often appear to work on the very
edge of meaninglessness.Beginning with a general introduction to
Beckett, his work and contexts, the guide looks at each of the
major genres in turn, analysing key works chronologically. It
explains why Beckett's texts can seem so daunting and confusing,
and focuses on key questions and issues. Giving an accessible
account of both the form and content of Beckett's work, this guide
will enable students to begin to get to grips with this fascinating
but daunting writer."Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed" are
clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers
and subjects that students and readers can find especially
challenging - or indeed downright bewildering. Concentrating
specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to
grasp, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas,
guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding
material.
Melancholy and the Archive examines how trauma, history and memory
are represented in key works of major contemporary writers (David
Mitchell, Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami, Jose Saramago). The book
explores how these authors construct crucial relationships between
sites of memoryGCothe archive becomes a central trope hereGCoand
the self that has been subjected to various traumas, various
losses. The archiveGCobe it a bureaucratic office (Saramago), an
underground bunker (Auster), a geographical space or landscape
(Mitchell) or even a hole (Murakami)GCobecomes the means by which
the self attempts to preserve and conserve his or her sense of
history even as the economy of trauma threatens to erase the
grounds of such preservation: as the subject or self is threatened
so the archive becomes a festishized site wherein history is
housed, accommodated, created, even fabricated. The archive, in
Freudian terms, becomes a space of melancholy precisely as the
subject preserves not only a personal history or a culture's
history, but also the history of the traumas that necessitates the
creation of the archive as such.
A reading of Blanchot's idea of the disaster in relation to
contemporary fiction of the United Kingdom and Ireland A
comprehensive examination of a central, but undefined, aspect of
Maurice Blanchot's deeply influential thought, the disaster
Sustains an argument for the importance of fiction for representing
and comprehending catastrophic events Examines the complex relation
between philosophy and fiction, suggesting a deeply reciprocal
relation between artistic and philosophical responses to the
disaster Blanchot, Ecology and Contemporary Fiction: The Thought of
the Disaster delves into Maurice Blanchot's enigmatic, and deeply
influential, notion of the disaster a term Blanchot famously
refuses to define. By exploring the novels of Jon McGregor, Mike
McCormack, David Mitchell, Jeannette Winterson and Maggie Gee,
Jonathan Boulter suggests that we can think of literature, the
space of the imagination, as the place where some conception
(ethical, ecological, or ontological) of the disaster emerges.
These novels, all in some ways about the disaster, just as they are
inflected by the disaster, become the place where an understanding
of critical events death, ecological catastrophe, pandemics is
possible.
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
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
In its intimate joining of self and machine, video gaming works to
extend the body into a fluid, dynamic, unstable, and discontinuous
entity. While digital gaming and culture has become a popular field
of academic study, there has been a lack of sustained philosophical
analysis of this direct gaming experience. In Parables of the
Posthuman: Digital Realities, Gaming, and the Player Experience,
author Jonathan Boulter addresses this gap by analyzing video games
and the player experience philosophically. Finding points of
departure in phenomenology and psychoanalysis, Boulter argues that
we need to think seriously about what it means to enter into a
relationship with the game machine and to assume (or to have
conferred upon you) a machinic, posthuman identity. Parables of the
Posthuman approaches the experience of gaming by asking: What does
it mean for the player to enter the machinic "world" of the game?
What forms of subjectivity does the game offer to the player? What
happens to consciousness itself when one plays? To this end,
Boulter analyzes the experience of particular role-playing video
games, including Fallout 3, Half-Life 2, Bioshock, Crysis 2, and
Metal Gear Solid 4. These games both thematize the idea of the
posthuman-the games are "about" subjects whose physical and
intellectual capacities are extended through machine or other
prosthetic means-and also enact an experience of the posthuman for
the player, who becomes more than what he was as he plays the game.
Boulter concludes by exploring how the game acts as a parable of
what the human, or posthuman, may look like in times to come.
Academics with an interest in the intersection of philosophy,
psychoanalysis, and popular culture forms and video gamers with an
interest in thinking about the implications of gaming will enjoy
this volume.
"Melancholy and the Archive" examines how trauma, history and
memory are represented in key works of major contemporary writers
such as David Mitchell, Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami and Jose
Saramago. The book explores how these authors construct crucial
relationships between sites of memory-the archive becomes a central
trope here-and the self that has been subjected to various traumas,
various losses. The archive-be it a bureaucratic office (Saramago),
an underground bunker (Auster), a geographical space or landscape
(Mitchell) or even a hole (Murakami)-becomes the means by which the
self attempts to preserve and conserve his or her sense of history
even as the economy of trauma threatens to erase the grounds of
such preservation: as the subject or self is threatened so the
archive becomes a festishized site wherein history is housed,
accommodated, created, even fabricated. The archive, in Freudian
terms, becomes a space of melancholy precisely as the subject
preserves not only a personal history or a culture's history, but
also the history of the traumas that necessitates the creation of
the archive as such.
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) is one of the most important twentieth
century writers. Seen as both a modernist and postmodernist, his
work has influenced generations of playwrights, novelists and
poets. Despite his notorious difficulty, Beckett famously refused
to offer his readers any help in interpreting his work. Beckett's
texts examine key philosophical-humanist questions but his writing
is challenging, perplexing and often intimidating for readers. This
guide offers students reading Beckett a clear starting point from
which to confront some of the most difficult plays and novels
produced in the twentieth century, texts which often appear to work
on the very edge of meaninglessness. Beginning with a general
introduction to Beckett, his work and its contexts, the guide looks
at each of the major genres in turn, analyzing key works
chronologically. It explains why Beckett's texts can seem so
impenetrable and confusing, and focuses on key questions and
issues. Giving an accessible account of both the form and content
of Beckett's work, this guide will enable students to begin to come
to grips with this fascinating but daunting writer.
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