Beckett, Technology and the Body

Critics have often focused on interiority in Beckett's works, privileging the mind over the body. In this intriguing approach, the first sustained analysis of embodiment in Beckett's prose, drama and media works, Ulrika Maude argues that physical and sensory experience is in fact central to the understanding of Beckett's writing. In innovative readings of sight, hearing, touch and movement in the full range of Beckett's works, Ulrika Maude uncovers the author's effort to shed light on embodied experience, paying attention to Beckett's interests in medicine and body-altering technologies such as prostheses. Through these material, bodily concerns Beckett explores wider themes of subjectivity and experience, interiority and exteriority, foregrounding the inextricable relationship between the body, the senses and the self. This important study offers a fascinating approach to Beckett, one in which the body takes its rightful place alongside the mind.

Author: Ulrika Maude
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 02/16/2009
Pages: 222
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.10w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780521515375

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 04/10/2009 pg. 17

About the Author
Maude, Ulrika: - Ulrika Maude is Senior Lecturer in Modernism and Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Bristol. She has published widely on modernist literature and technology, medicine, science and theories of embodiment, and is co-editor of Beckett and Phenomenology (2009) and The Body and the Arts (2009). She is currently co-editing The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature and The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature, both forthcoming in 2015, and completing two monographs, on Beckett and medicine, and modernism and medical culture.