Beckett and Nature

Charles Clements is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at Tufts University, USA. His research focuses on the metaphysical assumptions of 20th-century Irish and British fiction with a particular emphasis on issues of representation and non-knowledge. Eleanor Green works at the University of Manchester, UK. They are also Co-Ordinator for the Beyond Radical Network, a queer studies research network in the UK. They have presented at national and international conferences and their reviews and interviews can be found at the Beckett Circle and Review 31.James Martell is Associate Professor of French at Lyon College, USA. His publications include Beckett and Derrida (forthcoming), Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal: The Mother's Son (2019), Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature (2013; with Arka Chattopadhyay), and Tattooed Bodies: Theorizing Body Inscription Across Disciplines and Cultures (2021; with Erik Larsen). He is the volume editor of Understanding Sade, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2025).

We find in Beckett and Nature an incongruous and yet generative pairing yielding rich reflections on ecologies of world, body, and thought. More often than not, the discussion of Beckett’s nature(s) creates what the introduction calls a ‘productive impasse’—deftly illustrating the writer’s playful, ambivalent, and incisive engagement with taxonomies of the human and more-than-human. A fascinating and timely work.

• List of FIguresAcknowledgementsIntroduction (Charles Clements, Tufts University, USA, Eleanor Green, University of Manchester, UK, and James Martell, Lyon College, USA)Part I. Natural Bodies1. Mother Remains: Beckett’s autour Function and the Ecological (Jonathan Basile, University of British Columbia, Canada)2. Nonrelational Literature and Immanent Metaphysics: What Spinoza’s Nature Has to Say About Beckett's Form (Charles Clements, Tufts University, USA)3. "For the space of an instant": Beckett on the Subject of Thought (Bryan Counter, Framingham State University, USA)4. Enough Is Too Much: Reading Gender through Flowers in Beckett (Eleanor Green, University of Manchester, UK)5. Clinical Olfactory Environment Shapes Care Relationships in Samuel Beckett’s Murphy and Sam Thompson’s Jott. (Swati Joshi, Independent Researcher, India)Part II. Natural Worlds6. Breathing Human within Breathless Nature: Waiting for Godot in Pakistan (Saeed Muhammad Nasir, Emerson University Multan, Pakistan)7. Samuel Beckett’s Neo-Biomorphic Playlet Breath (1969) Sets the Stage for the Pirana (Swati Joshi, Independent Researcher, India)8. Foreseeing and Foresaying the Buddhist Unborn beyond Birth and Death in Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said (Asijit Datta, Symbiosis Centre for Media and Communication, Symbiosis International (Deemed University), India)9. Adorno’s Dialectic of Natural Beauty and Beckett’s Not I (Justin Neville Kaushall, Independent Scholar, UK)10. The Inanimate Agency: An Object-Oriented Ontological Reading of Beckett’s Endgame and Its Anti-Anthropocentric Implications (Mehmet Zeki Giritli, Koç University, Turkey)Part III. Natural Literatures11. Beckett’s Foiled Mimesis is/in Nature (James Martell, Lyon College, USA)12. Beckett and the Scream of Nature (Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania, USA)13. "Everything oozes": On Mud and Molebane in Beckett’s Dystopian Landscapes (Stanley E. Gontarski, Florida State University, USA)14. Denaturing and Renaturing: Samuel Beckett’s Reception in Martin McDonagh’s Cinema (Jack Dudley, Mount St. Mary’s University, USA)Notes on ContributorsIndex