Samuel Beckett and Ecology

This is the first full-length book to investigate Beckett’s work through contemporary ecological thinking, offering a wide range of artistic and scholarly responses to ongoing ecological crises.

In response to the ever-growing urgency of the ecological crisis, the vitality and the creativity of art and literature have been singled out as sources of hope by Nobel Prize awardee in chemistry and coiner of the ’Anthropocene’, Paul J. Crutzen. Samuel Beckett was not an environmental artist, but his oeuvre, poised between forms of precarity and hope, is a rich territory for the exploration of the most pressing issues of our time: the rift between the human species, its technological and economic advancement and the ecologies that sustain it all.

In recent years, Beckett’s name, aphorisms and work have frequently been invoked relative to this global crisis, helping stimulate debates on ecology, the arts and the eco-systemic place of the human. Beckett and Ecology is the first full-length book to offer a wide range of scholarly responses to the ecological crises provoked, mediated or challenged by Beckett’s work. The volume reflects on the varied practices and narratives in Beckettian intermedial ecologies, offering new insights into the connections between Beckett and the Anthropocene in the terrains of translation, adaptation, performance and the visual arts. Chapters also explore the potential of Happy Days (1961) for posthuman and ecological thought, and the role it has taken in eco-theatre. Short bursts of writing, entitled ’Coups de gong, ’ are woven throughout the volume and testify to the variety of Beckett-inspired local responses to global climate instability.

Trish McTighe is Lecturer in Drama at Queen’s University Belfast, UK.

Céline Thobois-Gupta is an IRC-funded PhD researcher in the Department of Drama at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, and an ECR Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub.

Nicholas Johnson is Associate Professor of Drama at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, where he directs the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies.