Machine generated contents note: -- Introduction -- What is a Beckettian Creature? -- Last Human and Becoming-Animal -- Concepts of the Creature and Creaturely Life -- Beckett After 1945 -- Testimony: Bearing Witness to the Event and Self. 'Impossibility of Expressing': Art of Failure and Lacuna of Testimony -- Fallibility and Dissociation -- (In)sovereign Author-Narrators -- Obligation to Testify: Mechanics, Enunciation, Ruins -- Testimony of Fiction -- Power: Master-Servant Relationships. Exercising Writing: Fascist Regime Against Liberal Art -- Watt the Fungible and Knott There: Objectified Servant and Absent Master -- 'A vague supplication': Melancholy in Waiting for Godot -- Master-Servant Context: The Holocaust and the Jewish Creature -- Biopolitical Struggles: Territory and Custody -- Humour: Failure and Degradation. Humour in Failure -- Textual Performances -- Words and Flesh in Endgame -- Metanarrative Tragicomedy -- 'turd waiting for the flush': Gallows Humour -- Survival: Incompleteness and Continuation. 'oh all to end': Beckettian Stirrings Still -- Creaturely 'Undeadness' -- Repetition and Performance -- Forms of Activity and Stasis in Molloy -- 'finish dying': Death Without Death in Molloy -- Epilogue.
Summary:
"In the shadow of the Holocaust, Samuel Beckett captures humanity in ruins through his debased beings and a decomposing mode of writing that strives to 'fail better'. But what might it mean to be a 'creature' or 'creaturely' in Beckett's world? In the first full-length study of the concept of the creature in Beckett's prose and drama, this book traces the suspended lives and melancholic existences of Beckett's ignorant and impotent creatures to assess the extent to which political value marks the divide between human and inhuman. Through close readings of Beckett's prose and drama, particularly texts from the middle period, including Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Anderton explicates four arenas of creaturely life in Beckett. Each chapter attends to a particular theme, testimony, power, humour and survival to analyse a range of pressures and impositions that precipitate the creaturely state of suspension. Drawing on the writings of Adorno, Agamben, Benjamin, Deleuze and Derrida to explore the overlaps between artistic and political structures of creation, the creature emerges as an in-between figure that bespeaks the provisional nature of the human. The result is a provocative examination of the indirect relationship between art and history through Beckett's treatment of testimony, power, humour and survival, which each attest to the destabilisation of meaning after Auschwitz"-- Provided by publisher.
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