Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath

More than any other scholar writing today, McNaughton changes the way we read Beckett. This book matters both for what it gives us, and what it deprives us of. After McNaughton, there can be no denying that Beckett worked consciously and consistently at the intersection of ethics, aesthetics and politics. In six extraordinary chapters, Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath traces that commitment from the early writings unto the great works of Beckett's maturity. In doing so, it provides the best account we have to date of Beckett's aesthetic practice, as well as providing stunning new readings of the artworks from which it emerged. With a flair uniquely his own, McNaughton balances the demands of close reading with an ability to illuminate local detail in historical and theoretical context. For all these reasons, this is an indispensable book. It is also a joy to read. You will learn something from every page. * Seán Kennedy, Saint Mary's University *
Rescuing Beckett from the existentialist void, James McNaughton shows how the language and formal structures of his texts engage actively and consequentially with some of the major political challenges of his time: the establishment of the Irish Free State, the rise of Nazism in Germany, and the effects of the second world war. McNaughton tells his story with wit, verve, and an urgency that compels us to recognize Beckett as an emphatically political writer who asks us to think long and hard about the implications of our own interpretative choices. A model of critical acumen and assiduous research, Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath is an indispensable book for Beckett specialists and for scholars and students of the wider field of aesthetic modernism. * Adam Parkes, University of Georgia *
McNaughton's unfailingly clear-eyed, immensely suggestive book is founded on a recognition that Beckett's early and mid-period work is a protracted meditation, not only on the intractable truth, but our necessary and continuing evasions of it, and that the result is a pervasively and irreducibly ironical aesthetic. McNaughton drastically rethinks many of the most established emphases in Beckett criticism. But the book's major achievement is to show in compelling detail how far the Beckettian will to abstraction which has determined so many accounts of him is in fact itself deliberately, ironically mined, punctuated and nuanced by the traces of political history. No-one has better glossed Beckett's extraordinary -- and extraordinarily subtle -- political intelligence, sensitivity and scruple. * Andrew Gibson, University of London *
Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath presents a historicist and materialist analysis of Samuel Beckett's work. Building on the historicist turn in modernist studies, as well as Irish studies and postcolonial paradigms, it develops new terms through which we can understand Beckett's political aesthetic. * John Greaney, Goethe University Frankfurt *