Beckett's Intermedial Ecosystems
Closed Space Environments across the Stage, Prose and Media Works

Investigates selected Beckett works presenting worlds where the human does not occupy a privileged place in the order of creation.

Anna McMullan (Author)

9781108959056, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 18 February 2021

75 pages
22.9 x 15.1 x 0.5 cm, 0.128 kg

This Element draws on the concept of ecosystems to investigate selected Beckett works across different media which present worlds where the human does not occupy a privileged place in the order of creation: rather Beckett's human figures are trapped in a regulated system in which they have little agency. Readers, listeners or viewers are complicit in the operation of techniques of observation inherent to the system, but also reminded of the vulnerability of those subjected to it. Beckett's work offers new paradigms and practices which reposition the human in relation to space, time and species.

1. Introduction
2. The theatrum mundi as ecosystem: Beckett's mimes and dramatic fragments
3. Exhausted biospheres and techniques of observation: the closed space prose texts
4. Televisual systems and Romantic ghosts of the Anthropocenel 5. Conclusion: other ways of being.

Subject Areas: Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]