Samuel Beckett's Geological Imagination

Samuel Beckett's Geological Imagination addresses the ubiquity of earthy objects in Beckett's prose, drama and poetry.

Mark Byron (Author)

9781108738965, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 8 October 2020

75 pages
23 x 15 x 1 cm, 0.14 kg

Samuel Beckett's Geological Imagination addresses the ubiquity of earthy objects in Beckett's prose, drama and poetry, exploring how mineral and archaeological objects bear upon the themes, narrative locus, and sensibilities of Beckett's texts in surprisingly varied ways. By deploying figures of ruination and excavation with etymological self-awareness, Beckett's late prose narratives – Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho – comprise a late-career meditation on the stratigraphic layerings of language and memory over an extended writing career. These layers comprise an embodied record of writing in their allusions to literary history and to Beckett's own oeuvre.

1. 'Saxa loquuntur!'
2. Company: Mining Beckett's Literary Memory
3. Ill Seen Ill Said: Turning Deasil Among the Cromlechs
4. Wordly Corrasion in Worstward Ho
Conclusion: The Masonry of Representation.

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