BOOK NEWS: Beckett's ecological thinking

Samuel Beckett and Ecology

Edited by Trish McTighe, Céline Thobois-Gupta, and Nicholas E. Johnson

Methuen Drama, 2025

ISBN: 9781350366022

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/samuel-beckett-and-ecology-9781350366022/

This is the first full-length book to investigate Samuel Beckett's work through contemporary ecological thinking, offering a wide range of artistic and scholarly responses to the ecological crises provoked, mediated or challenged by Beckett's work.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

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 been invoked relative to environmental catastrophe, helping stimulate debates on ecology, the arts and the ecosystemic place of the human. The volume reflects on ecology as a productive term, as well as the varied practices and narratives in Beckettian intermedial ecologies. While some authors offer new insights into the connections between Beckett and the Anthropocene across translation, adaptation, performance and the visual arts, others also explore the potential of Happy Days (1961) for ecological thought and the role it has taken in recent ecodramaturgical experiments in the theatre. Woven throughout the volume are short bursts of writing, 'coups de gong', which testify to the variety of Beckett-inspired local responses to global climate instability.

"This volume us transformation in Beckett studies in its range of global contributors and in the dialogues it sets up between scholars, artists, and activists. This book is an important and compelling addition to Beckett studies, theatre studies, and ecocriticism." --Anna McMullan, University of Reading

Trish McTighe is senior lecturer in Drama at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. Her publications include Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland and Staging Beckett in Great Britain, both co-edited with David Tucker, and the monographs The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama and Carnivals of Ruin: Beckett, Ireland and the Festival Form. She is theatre reviews editor for the Journal of Beckett Studies.

Céline Thobois-Gupta is an IRC-funded PhD researcher and an adjunct assistantpProfessor in the Department of Drama at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, as well as an ECR Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub. She is published in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, The Beckett Circle, Theatre Journal and Samuel Beckett and Technology. She is also co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies on the anthropocene.

Nicholas E. Johnson is associate professor and Head of Drama at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, where he co-directs the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies. He has published two co-authored monographs, Experimental Beckett: Contemporary Performance Practices (with Jonathan Heron, 2020) and Bertolt Brecht’s David Fragments (1919–1921): An Interdisciplinary Study (Bloomsbury/T & T Clark, with David Shepherd, 2020). He has also co-edited two volumes on Beckett: Beckett’s Voices / Voicing Beckett (2021) and Influencing Beckett / Beckett Influencing (2020).