Includes bibliographical references (pages 245-260) and index.

Introduction : Beckett and nothing : trying to understand Beckett / Daniela Caselli -- On not being there : going on without in Beckett / John Pilling -- Nothing of value : reading Beckett's negativity / Peter Boxall -- Nothing has changed / Mladen Dolar -- 'A tangle of tatters' : ghosts and the busy nothing in Footfalls / Stephen Thomson -- Nothings in particular / Bill Prosser -- Unwords / Shane Weller -- Into the void : Beckett's television plays and the idea of broadcasting / Jonathan Bignell -- Beckett, Feldman, Salcedo ... Neither / Derval Tubridy -- From Film to literature : theoretical debates and the critical erasure of Beckett's cinema / Matthijs Engelberts -- Beckett and unheard sound / Catherine Laws -- It's nothing : Beckett and anxiety / Russell Smith -- '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.

"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. Nothing remains both a central preoccupation in the criticism and a pedagogical problem in the classroom. 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 l̀ittle nothings' pervade the Beckett canon." "The volume has two main functions: on the one hand it looks at ǹothing' 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 ǹothing' in order to assess how the Beckett oeuvre can help us rethink contemporary preoccupations with materialism, neurology, sculpture, music, and television." "The volume is a scholarly intervention in the fields of Beckett studies which offers its chapters as case studies to use in the classroom. 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, and Comparative Literature, Drama, Visual Studies, Philosophy, Music, Cinema, and TV Studies"--Jacket.

Print version record.

Open Access EbpS