Beckett and Nothing Trying to understand Beckett

Beckett's reception was characterised in its early stages by a sustained attention to nothing as a philosophical concept. Theodor Adorno, however, was quick to argue that Beckett's plays resisted - unlike Sartre's - having their nothing transformed into something. This Beckettian nothing, moreover, is often invested with the aura of the genius, either for eulogical or dismissive purposes. This volume invites its readership to understand the complex ways in which the Beckett canon both suggests and resists turning nothing into something by looking at specific, sometimes almost invisible ways in which 'little nothings' pervade the Beckett canon.The volume has two main functions: on the one hand, it looks at 'nothing' not only as a content but also a set of rhetorical strategies to reconsider afresh classic Beckett problems such as Irishness, silence, value, marginality, politics and the relationships between modernism and postmodernism and absence and presence. On the other, it focuses on 'nothing' in order to assess how the Beckett oeuvre can help us rethink contemporary preoccupations with materialism, neurology, sculpture, music and television. Both advanced students and scholars of Beckett will find the volume of interest. It comprises jargon-free chapters that analyse Beckett's prose, drama, film, television, manuscripts and marginalia. It will prove of interest to advanced students and scholars in English, French, Comparative Literature, Drama, Visual Studies, Philosophy, Music, Cinema and TV studies.

Daniela Caselli is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture in the School of Arts, Histories, and Cultures at the University of Manchester.

Terry Eagleton is Professor at the Universities of Lancaster.
Jonathan Bignell is Professor of Television and Film at the University of Reading.

Foreword
Nothing new - Terry Eagleton
Introduction
Beckett and nothing: trying to understand Beckett - Daniela Caselli
1. On not being there: going on without in Beckett - John Pilling
2. Nothing of value: reading Beckett's negativity - Peter Boxall
3. Nothing has changed - Mladen Dolar
4. 'A tangle of tatters': ghosts and the busy nothing in Footfalls - Stephen Thomson
5. Nothings in particular - Bill Prosser
6. Unwords - Shane Weller
7. Into the Void: Beckett's television plays and the idea of broadcasting - Jonathan Bignell
8. Beckett, Feldman, Salcedo… Neither - Derval Tubridy
9. From Film to literature: theoretical debates and the critical erasure of Beckett's cinema - Matthijs Engelberts
10. Beckett and unheard sound - Catherine Laws
11. It's nothing: Beckett and anxiety - Russell Smith
12. 'Something or nothing': Beckett and the matter of language - Laura Salisbury
Coda
The no-thing that knows no name and the Beckett envelope, blissfully reconsidered - Enoch Brater
Bibliography
Index