Cluttered Universes of Samuel Beckett and Tadeusz Kantor

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-041-03835-1
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 174 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature

Cluttered Universes of Samuel Beckett and Tadeusz Kantor is a collection of four essays bringing Kantor’s and Beckett’s texts, theatres, and theories into conversation with deconstruction, new materialism, environmental humanities, and posthumanism. This book is dedicated to two artists rarely discussed together to see how their awareness of poetics and performativity of matter might help us understand our connection to the material world, even if the world is falling apart. Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton, and others pave the way for new critical interpretations of canonical works, which are recognised as universes “cluttered” with matter, objects, things, and other nonhuman visitors of seemingly exclusive human domains. Kisiel shows that Beckett’s and Kantor’s carefulness and care for imagining nonhuman/human relationships might refresh our understanding of memory, togetherness, death, or even the end of the world for the Anthropocene.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kisiel, Michal

Fachgebiete

• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biowissenschaften Ökologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biowissenschaften, Biologie: Sachbuch, Naturführer
• Geowissenschaften Geographie | Raumplanung Geographie: Sachbuch, Reise
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

The Fear of Meaning Something

Cluttered Universes

Bringing Matter Back to Life

The Two Ends of the World

Putting the Void to Work

From Difference to Diffraction

Bibliography

CHAPTER 1. Diffraction of I: Diffractive Memories and Kantor’s Theatre of Death

Exit History

Dark Crammed Holes

Diffraction and Repetition

Photographic Apparatuses

Diffraction of I

Bibliography

CHAPTER 2. “Unspeakable Homes”: Uninhabitable Spaces and the Ruins of the Everyday World

I Am Not I, Therefore I Am (at Home)

The Parrot and the Grave

Dusty Archives

Elevating the Rags

Neither

Bibliography

CHAPTER 3. Resilient Survivors: Insects, Mannequins, and the Death of the Nonhuman

Nonhuman Noises, Excessive Images

Heretic Machines

Dying Is Never Death

The Logic of the Swarm

Coda: Insect Technologies

Bibliography

CHAPTER 4. Elsewhere but Here: Beckett’s Exhausted Ecologies and Liminal Intimacies

A Tree with Too Many Leaves

The Ecopoetics of Exhaustion

Thus Flesh and Bone Subsist

Intimacy Is Persistence

Global Failures

Bibliography

CONCLUSIONS

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Michal Kisiel is a literary scholar, translator, editor, and assistant professor at Jan Dlugosz University in Czestochowa, Poland. In 2019, he received his PhD in literary studies. He has published in Journal of Beckett Studies, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, ER(R)GO, Zoophilologica, and Review of International American Studies, among other places. He is an editorial team member of ER(R)GO: Theory – Literature – Culture and a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences Commission on Literary History (Katowice Branch). His academic interests include experimental literature, deconstruction, materialist theories of the nonhuman, contemporary poetry, theatre and drama, and environmental humanities.