Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett's Short Prose

Jonathan Boulter offers the reader a way of understanding Beckett’s presentation of the human, more precisely, posthuman, subject in his short prose. These texts are notoriously difficult yet utterly compelling. This compelling difficulty arises from Beckett’s radical dismantling of the idea of the human. His short texts offer instead an image of a being who may be posthumous, or ultimately beyond categories of life and death. And yet, despite this dismantling, the narrators of these texts still find themselves placed within material, recognisable, spaces. This book explores what the idea of ‘world’ can mean to a subject who appears to have moved into a material, even ecological, space that is beyond categories of life and death, being and world.

• Provides a philosophical reading of Samuel Beckett
• Rethinks Beckett in relation to the posthuman
• Contributes to a relatively ignored aspect of Samuel Beckett's writing, the short prose