Beckett and Animals

A new collection of essays edited by Mary Bryden

Beckett and Animals, ed. Mary Bryden

Beckett and Animals
Edited by Mary Bryden
University of Reading

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The animals that appear in Samuel Beckett's work are diverse and unpredictable. They serve as victim and persecutor, companion and adversary, disconcerting observers and objects oblivious to the human gaze. Bringing together an international array of Beckett specialists, this is the first full-length study to explore the significance of the animals that populate Beckett's prose, drama and poetry. Essays theorise a broad spectrum of animal manifestations while focusing on the roles that distinct animal forms play within Beckett's work, including horses, sheep, cats, dogs, bees, insects and others. Contributors situate close readings within a larger literary and cultural context, drawing on thinkers ranging from Aristotle to Deleuze, Foucault and Agamben, and on authors such as Flaubert, Kafka and Coetzee. The result is an incisive and provocative collection that traverses disciplinary boundaries, revealing how Beckett's creatures challenge conventional notions of species identity and, ultimately, what it means to be human.

Hardback £55.00 Discount price £44.00

Contents

List of Contributors; Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations
Introduction, by Mary Bryden

Part I: Animality

1. Shane Weller, ‘Forms of Weakness: Animalisation in Kafka and Beckett’;
2. Yoshiki Tajiri, ‘Beckett, Coetzee, and Animals’;
3. Mary Bryden, ‘The Beckettian Bestiary’;
4. David Wheatley, ‘”Quite Exceptionally Anthropoid”: Species Anxiety and Metamorphosis in Beckett's Humans and Other Animals’;
5. Naoya Mori, ‘”An Animal Inside”: Beckett/Leibniz’s Stone, Animal, Human and the Unborn’;
6. Ulrika Maude, ‘Pavlov's Dogs and Other Animals in Samuel Beckett’;
7. Yoshiyuki Inoue, ‘Little Animals in the Brain: Beckett's “porteurs de la mémoire”’.

Part II: The Specificity of Animals

8. Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘”Think, Pig!”: Beckett's Animal Philosophies’;
9. Linda Ben-Zvi, ‘Beckett's “Necessary” Cat(s)’;
10. Steven Connor, ‘Making Flies Mean Something’;
11. Joseph Anderton, ‘”Hooves!”: The Equine Presence in Beckett’;
12. Angela Moorjani, ‘The Dancing Bees in Samuel Beckett's Molloy: The Rapture of Unknowing’;
13. Chris Ackerley, ‘”Despised for Their Obviousness”: Samuel Beckett's Dogs’;
14. Julie Campbell, ‘Beckett and Sheep’;
15. Maximilian de Gaynesford, ‘”Eyes in Each Other's Eyes”: Beckett, Kleist, and the Fencing Bear’;
16. Brigitte Le Juez, ‘Words Without Acts: Beckett's Parrots’.

Index

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Who is Beckett's Godot?
• A Companion to Samuel Beckett
• University of Reading: Beckett Conference 2009

Aaron Hillyer: The Disappearance of Literature

A new publication from Bloomsbury

Aaron Hillyer, The Disappearance of Literature: Blanchot, Agamben, and the Writers of the No

From Bloomsbury:

Aaron Hillyer considers the fate and implications of Maurice Blanchot's enigmatic formulation of literature's future: "Literature is heading to its essence, which is its disappearance." The Disappearance of Literature's primary theoretical objective is to highlight a previously neglected difference between Blanchot's and Agamben's philosophies. These philosophical and literary arguments proceed by examining a series of related concepts: study, sexuality, language, mysticism, and friendship. Despite the fact that Blanchot and Agamben often serve today as primary points of reference for literary theory, no significant critical work has yet examined their works in a sustained dialogue. Hillyer initiates this new trajectory of research through readings of Blanchot's The Unavowable Community and Agamben's The Open, which are followed by encounters with books by contemporary writers Vila-Matas, Aira, and Carson. The juxtaposition of these two different forms of writing (philosophy as literature and literature as philosophy) shows that the new kind of writing analyzed here holds both "literature" and "philosophy" at a certain distance from each other as well as from themselves. The primary means of this distantiation is the gesture of deactivation performed by the act of "study." The narrators and authors examined here often "study" both literature and philosophy in order to remove them from their perilous metaphysical foundations. In this way, Hillyer argues, the "study-novel" emerges as a basic paradigm of the disappearance of literature, a new category of literary creation marked by Agamben's dispute with Blanchot. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Photographs of Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot: Thomas Reads a Book
• Maurice Blanchot on Giacometti and Writing
• 10 Years Since Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot: Corrected Proofs
• Michel Foucault on Maurice Blanchot

Beyond Historicism: Resituating Samuel Beckett

The University of New South Wales, Kensington, Sydney · 7-8 December, 2012

Trilogy images courtesy of Neven Udovičić

A call for papers (see below) has been distributed for an upcoming conference at The University of New South Wales in Sydney. Thank you to Laura Foster for getting in touch about the event.

About the Conference

When Samuel Beckett's novel Molloy first appeared in France, in May 1951, Georges Bataille called it an "extravagant, fantastic, sordid" tale that precipitated a "monstrous myth". The two novels that succeeded Molloy - Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1953) - have, despite their author's resistance, collectively come to be known as the Trilogy. Yet if Bataille (and other French critics) initially saw these works as contributions to the European avant-garde, subsequent critical responses have been more wide-ranging, considering them as, for example, psychoanalytical case-studies, violations of generic forms (detective novel, memoir-cum-confession, domestic comedy, novel of ideas) and as fictional demonstrations of what will later be theorised as deconstruction. But perhaps the most telling indicator of the Trilogy's enduring influence is that, even as it affirmed the death of the novel as a viable narrative form, it also inspired at least two other fictional trilogies: Paul Auster's New York Trilogy and John Banville's Frames Trilogy.

Following Faber's recent re-publication of the three novels, this conference seeks to re-examine how these and other works can be read now, at this particular moment in Beckett studies. Responding to or even reacting against the theoretical turn of the mid-1980s, the so-called 'archival' turn of the past fifteen years has sought to place Beckett's works on a more empirical and evidential footing. Driven by two biographies, scholarly annotations of Beckett's notebooks, and, most recently, two volumes of the Letters, this orientation has developed a critical apparatus that often works to foreclose on or at least proscribe more speculative, exploratory engagements with the Beckett oeuvre.

One of the aims of this conference is to resituate the Trilogy at the heart of Beckett's prose corpus. To that effect, there will be at least two panels based on re-examinations of the three novels. However, we also invite papers that address any other part of Beckett's writing - fictional, dramatic, cinematic or critical - and consider how it might be read and understood in the wake of the historicist-empirical emphasis of the last fifteen years. How does Beckett's work appear to us now, when put into dialogue with more recent critical and philosophical approaches to literature, such as (but not limited to) cognitive literary studies, neuoroaesthetics, thing theory, the 'new' narratology, eco-poetics, theories of affect, cybercriticism, technics, trauma theory, swarm theory, biopolitics, network ecologies, the new aestheticism, literary-legal studies, and so on? And how does Beckett's work seem when confronted with the doyens of 'post-theory', both evident already in Beckett studies (Badiou, Agamben) and less visible (Rancière, Žižek, Stiegler, Nancy, Latour)? Or when set alongside other, more idiosyncratic thinkers - Kittler, Sloterdijk, Meillassoux?

Confirmed keynote speakers

Professor Derek Attridge (University of York, UK)
Assoc. Professor Anthony Uhlmann (University of Western Sydney)

Conference venue

The University of New South Wales, Kensington, Sydney

All enquiries

resituating.beckett@gmail.com

Call for papers

Potential papers should address the Trilogy, or any other part of Beckett's work, in its textual, historical, theoretical and / or formal dimensions, and consider how any of these might be recast or rethought in light of the debates outlined above.

Abstracts should be no more than 250 words, and submitted via email, to: resituating.beckett@gmail.com Please include the paper title, and a brief biography and contact details of the presenting author.

Submission deadline: 31 October 2012, at 5pm.

Please note: authors of successful submissions will have 20 minutes to present their paper.

Registration

Academic / salaried $250
Academic / non-salaried $130
Payment options available soon.

Website

Beyond Historicism: Resituating Samuel Beckett - Macquarie University

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Giorgio Agamben on Kafka and The Trial

An extract from Remnants of Auschwitz

From Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive:

In 1983, the publisher Einaudi asked [Primo] Levi to translate Kafka's The Trial. Infinite interpretations of The Trial have been offered; some underline the novel's prophetic political character (modern bureaucracy as absolute evil) or its theological dimension (the court as the unknown God) or its biographical meaning (condemnation as the illness from which Kafka believed himself to suffer). It has been rarely noted that this book, in which law appears solely in the form of  trial, contains a profound insight into the nature of law, which, contrary to common belief, is not so much rule as it is judgment and, therefore, trial. But if the essence of the law - of every law - is the trial, if all right (and morality that is contaminated by it) is only tribunal right, then execution and transgression, innocence and guilt, obedience and disobedience all become indistinct and lose their importance. "The court wants nothing from you. It welcomes you when you come; it releases you when you go." The ultimate end of the juridical regulation is to produce judgment; but judgment aims neither to punish not to extol, nether to establish justice nor to prove the truth. Judgment is in itself the end and this, it has been said, constitutes its mystery, the mystery of the trial.