Beckett and Buddhism

Beckett and Buddhism undertakes a 21st century reassessment of the Buddhist resonances sounding through Beckett's writing.

Angela Moorjani (Author)

9781316519691, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 July 2021

260 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 1.9 cm, 0.53 kg

'Moorjani undertakes 'to refute the charge of nihilism against Beckett' (p. 76) by focussing on how the effect of emptiness or emptying (a key Buddhist notion) is realized with powerful aesthetic and spiritual impact in particular texts, underlining in particular the role of meditation in Beckett's later works and the value attached to the void as a longed-for 'home'.' Joseph S. O'Leary, Journal of Irish Studies

Beckett and Buddhism undertakes a twenty-first-century reassessment of the Buddhist resonances in Samuel Beckett's writing. These reverberations, as Angela Moorjani demonstrates, originated in his early reading of Schopenhauer. Drawing on letters and archives along with recent studies of Buddhist thought and Schopenhauer's knowledge of it, the book charts the Buddhist concepts circling through Beckett's visions of the 'human predicament' in a blend of tears and laughter. Moorjani offers an in-depth elucidation of texts that are shown to intersect with the negative and paradoxical path of the Buddha, which she sets in dialogue with Western thinking. She brings further perspectives from cognitive philosophy and science to bear on creative emptiness, the illusory 'I', and Beckett's probing of the writing process. Readers will benefit from this far-reaching study of one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century who explored uncharted topologies in his fiction, theatre, and poetry.

Introduction: Buddhism, Schopenhauer, Beckett: Influence Affinity, Relay?
1. Schopenhauer's Buddhism Revisited: Recent Archival Evidence
2. East-West Dialogue via Schopenhauer
3. Buddhist and Mystic Threads in the Early Fiction
4. Beckett's Paradoxical Logic through Buddhist and Western Lenses
5. The Coincidence of Contraries and Noh Drama
6. The No-Self Staged and Voices from Elsewhere
7. Rebirth and the Buddhist Unborn in the Fiction and Drama
8. Dreaming 'all away' in the Final Texts.

Subject Areas: Buddhism [HRE], Literary theory [DSA], Literature & literary studies [D]