Beckett and Phenomenology

Ulrika Maude is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Bristol, where she also directs the Centre for Health, Humanities and Science. Matthew Feldman is Emeritus Professor in the Modern History of Ideas, and Professorial Fellow at the Anglia Ruskin University, UK.

"Though phenomenology and its offshoot, existentialism, were very much in the air when Beckett's creative genius first became known in Europe and abroad, to date no study has looked as comprehensively as does Beckett and Phenomenology at the interconnections between his writing and that philosophical perspective, however diverse its manifestations. All the greats are there: From Husserl to Sartre to Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and beyond. And Beckett's greatness, however diverse its manifestations, is revealed in a very new light. Beckett and Phenomenology is truly a phenomenology of Beckett's world! - Professor Lois Oppenheim, Past President of The Samuel Beckett Society.

• Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Beckettian Phenomenologies? Ulrika Maude (University of Durham) and Matthew Feldman (University of Northampton) PART I: BECKETT AND PHENOMENOLOGY 1. 'But what was this pursuit of meaning, in this indifference to meaning?': Beckett, Husserl and 'Meaning Creation', Matthew Feldman (University of Northampton) 2. Phenomenologies of the Nothing: Democritus, Heidegger, Beckett, Shane Weller (University of Kent at Canterbury) 3. Beckett and Sartre: The Nauseous Character of All Flesh, Steven Connor (Birkbeck College, University of London) 4. 'Material of a Strictly Peculiar Order': Beckett, Merleau-Ponty and Perception, Ulrika Maude (University of Durham) PART II: BECKETT'S PHENOMENOLOGIES 5. Between Art-world and Life-world: Beckett's Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Mark Nixon (University of Reading) 6. Murphydurke, or towards a Phenomenology of Immaturity, Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania) 7. Bodily Histories: Beckett and the Phenomenological Approach to the Other, Steven Matthews (Oxford Brookes University) 8. What Remains of Beckett: Evasion and History, Daniel Katz (Université de Paris VII) 9. Beckett's Ghost Dramas: Monitoring a Phenomenology of Sleep, Paul Sheehan (Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia) 10. Living the Unnamable: A Phenomenology of Reading, Paul Stewart (University of Nicosia) 11. The 'Distinct Context of Relevant Knowledge': Beckett's 'Yellow' and the Phenomenology of Annotation, Chris Ackerley (University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand) Index