Amanda Dennis | The American University of Paris (AUP) (original) (raw)
Articles by Amanda Dennis
Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, 2020
The Unnamable challenges Enlightenment versions of progress whereby journeys and stories advance ... more The Unnamable challenges Enlightenment versions of progress whereby journeys and stories advance toward an end, but to equate the work with impasse is to miss its generative potential. Invoking Derrida's re-conceptualization of aporia as a refashioning of the meaning of progress, I read the novel's radical doubt as an alternative to dialectical advancement – as a strategy for redesigning the concept of the limit in concert with one's surroundings. What The Unnamable dramatizes under the sign of aporia is a temporary imbrication within one's environment – a merging of self, words, earth and mud – that may generate unpredictable forms, metamorphoses.
http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/jobs.2015.0135
Lying in ditches, tromping through mud, wedged in urns, trash bins, buried in earth, bodies in Be... more Lying in ditches, tromping through mud, wedged in urns, trash bins, buried in earth, bodies in Beckett appear anything but capable of acting meaningfully on their environments. Bodies in Beckett seem, rather, synonymous with abjection, brokenness, and passivity—as if the human were overcome by its materiality: odours, pain, foot sores, decreased mobility. To the extent that Beckett’s personae act, they act vaguely (wandering) or engage in quasi-obsessive, repetitive tasks: maniacal rocking, rotating sucking stones and biscuits, uttering words evacuated of sense, ceaseless pacing. Perhaps the most vivid dramatization of bodies compelled to meaningless, repetitive movement is Quad (1981), Beckett’s “ballet” for television, in which four bodies in hooded robes repeat their series ad infinitum. By 1981, has all possibility for intentional action in Beckett been foreclosed? Are we doomed, as Hamm puts it, to an eternal repetition of the same? (“Moments for nothing, now as always, time was never and time is over, reckoning closed and story ended.”)
This article proposes an alternative reading of bodily abjection, passivity and compulsivity in Beckett, a reading that implies a version of agency more capacious than voluntarism. Focusing on Quad as an illustrative case, I show how, if we shift our focus from the body’s diminished possibilities for movement to the imbrication of Beckett’s personae in environments (a mound of earth), things, and objects, a different story emerges: rather than dramatizing the impossibility of action, Beckett’s work may sketch plans for a more ecological, post-human version of agency, a more collaborative mode of “acting” that eases the divide between the human, the world of inanimate objects, and the earth.
Movements such as new materialism and object-oriented ontology challenge hierarchies among subjects, objects and environments, questioning the rigid distinction between animate and inanimate, and the notion of the Anthropocene emphasizes the influence of human activity on social and geological space. A major theoretical challenge that arises from such discourses (including 20th-century challenges to the idea of an autonomous, willing, subject) is to arrive at an account of agency robust enough to survive if not the “death of the subject” then its imbrication in the material and social environment it acts upon. Beckett’s treatment of the human body suggests a version of agency that draws strength from a body’s interaction with its environment, such that meaning is formed in the nexus between body and world. Using the example of Quad, I show how representations of the body in Beckett disturb the opposition between compulsivity (when a body is driven to move or speak in the absence of intention) and creative invention. In Quad, serial repetition works to create an interface between body and world that is receptive to meanings outside the control of a human will. Paradoxically, compulsive repetition in Beckett, despite its uncomfortable closeness to addiction, harnesses a loss of individual control that proposes a more versatile and ecologically mindful understanding of human action.
Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 38, No. 2, Winter 2015
Watt, Samuel Beckett's "anti-logical" interwar novel, is generally recognized as a parody of the ... more Watt, Samuel Beckett's "anti-logical" interwar novel, is generally recognized as a parody of the binary oppositions that underlie logical systems. is article moves beyond readings of Watt as a pastiche of logical positivism or as the sign of rationalism's exhaustion to argue that the novel's "glitches in logic" initiate a sensual poetics whereby sound-textures come to rival semantic sense. e text does exploit the pitfalls of rational systems, particularly their tendency to elide the body and their inability to code for infinite numbers or emotions, but where the zeros and ones of binary code approach absurdity, different possibilities for meaning emerge. rough references to bodily experience, desires, and ailments, as well as through associations of sounds and laughter, Watt, anticipating characteristics of Beckett's later texts, emphasizes the body as necessary to the construction of meaning in language.
Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui: "Beginning of the Murmur": Archival Pre-Texts and Other Sources, 2015
Beckett’s four nouvelles parody Romantic affinities between human subjectivity and landscape. Set... more Beckett’s four nouvelles parody Romantic affinities between human subjectivity and landscape. Settings become fragmented, de-anthropomorphized and text-like. Since it is impossible to project one’s inner states onto landscape, communication with one’s surroundings is achievable only through idiosyncrasies of habitation: for instance the odd manner in which Beckett’s narrators occupy taxicabs, rooms, sidewalks, boats, and nautical capstans. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau argues that individuals re-appropriate socially organized spaces by “poaching” (braconnage). Such tactics are at play, too, when Beckett’s narrators transform ordinary objects, becoming “poets of their own acts” as their “errant” trajectories subversively remake social space.
The European Legacy, Jan 1, 2011
Review Essays by Amanda Dennis
Comparative Critical Studies, Jan 1, 2012
, formerly entitled -is a bi-annual peer-reviewed international journal in critical theory and li... more , formerly entitled -is a bi-annual peer-reviewed international journal in critical theory and linguistics. It publishes essays and reviews in English and French which explore general critical theory and its application to literature, as well as general and applied linguistics. Website: http://jlsl.upg-ploiesti.ro Editorial Office: UPG
Journal of Modern Literature, 2017
What returns and recurs across Samuel Beckett's art in different media—prose, theater, television... more What returns and recurs across Samuel Beckett's art in different media—prose, theater, television, radio, and film—is resistance to representation. Beckett's work diverges from art that points outside itself to some facet of the familiar world, but neither does it favor abstraction, which is, according to Beckett's commentary in letters and essays, too far removed, sealed against “what is.” How, then, is art to relate to the perceptual and emotional material of “what is”? What techniques, what vision might ensure adequate attention to the complexity of experiential material while protecting its possibilities for remaking itself, perhaps prompted by aesthetic experience? The term Beckett chooses to describe this positioning is “non-relation,” and the essays in The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts suggest a Beckettian art beyond—or better, between—representation and abstraction.
The Heythrop Journal, Jan 1, 2010
Papers by Amanda Dennis
Journal of Beckett Studies, Apr 1, 2020
Cette étude interroge les raisons pour lesquelles Samuel Beckett a écrit en français après la Sec... more Cette étude interroge les raisons pour lesquelles Samuel Beckett a écrit en français après la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Son expatriation linguistique signale une ambivalence à l'égard de son paysage d'origine, son identité nationale, sa mère et son maître littéraire, James Joyce. La liberté d'écrire en français mène Beckett à une exploration profonde et personnelle, donnant ainsi naissance à un style littéraire qui accède à ce qui est le plus proche par le biais de ce qui semble le plus étranger.
Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, 2020
The Unnamable challenges Enlightenment versions of progress whereby journeys and stories advance ... more The Unnamable challenges Enlightenment versions of progress whereby journeys and stories advance toward an end, but to equate the work with impasse is to miss its generative potential. Invoking Derrida's re-conceptualization of aporia as a refashioning of the meaning of progress, I read the novel's radical doubt as an alternative to dialectical advancement – as a strategy for redesigning the concept of the limit in concert with one's surroundings. What The Unnamable dramatizes under the sign of aporia is a temporary imbrication within one's environment – a merging of self, words, earth and mud – that may generate unpredictable forms, metamorphoses.
http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/jobs.2015.0135
Lying in ditches, tromping through mud, wedged in urns, trash bins, buried in earth, bodies in Be... more Lying in ditches, tromping through mud, wedged in urns, trash bins, buried in earth, bodies in Beckett appear anything but capable of acting meaningfully on their environments. Bodies in Beckett seem, rather, synonymous with abjection, brokenness, and passivity—as if the human were overcome by its materiality: odours, pain, foot sores, decreased mobility. To the extent that Beckett’s personae act, they act vaguely (wandering) or engage in quasi-obsessive, repetitive tasks: maniacal rocking, rotating sucking stones and biscuits, uttering words evacuated of sense, ceaseless pacing. Perhaps the most vivid dramatization of bodies compelled to meaningless, repetitive movement is Quad (1981), Beckett’s “ballet” for television, in which four bodies in hooded robes repeat their series ad infinitum. By 1981, has all possibility for intentional action in Beckett been foreclosed? Are we doomed, as Hamm puts it, to an eternal repetition of the same? (“Moments for nothing, now as always, time was never and time is over, reckoning closed and story ended.”)
This article proposes an alternative reading of bodily abjection, passivity and compulsivity in Beckett, a reading that implies a version of agency more capacious than voluntarism. Focusing on Quad as an illustrative case, I show how, if we shift our focus from the body’s diminished possibilities for movement to the imbrication of Beckett’s personae in environments (a mound of earth), things, and objects, a different story emerges: rather than dramatizing the impossibility of action, Beckett’s work may sketch plans for a more ecological, post-human version of agency, a more collaborative mode of “acting” that eases the divide between the human, the world of inanimate objects, and the earth.
Movements such as new materialism and object-oriented ontology challenge hierarchies among subjects, objects and environments, questioning the rigid distinction between animate and inanimate, and the notion of the Anthropocene emphasizes the influence of human activity on social and geological space. A major theoretical challenge that arises from such discourses (including 20th-century challenges to the idea of an autonomous, willing, subject) is to arrive at an account of agency robust enough to survive if not the “death of the subject” then its imbrication in the material and social environment it acts upon. Beckett’s treatment of the human body suggests a version of agency that draws strength from a body’s interaction with its environment, such that meaning is formed in the nexus between body and world. Using the example of Quad, I show how representations of the body in Beckett disturb the opposition between compulsivity (when a body is driven to move or speak in the absence of intention) and creative invention. In Quad, serial repetition works to create an interface between body and world that is receptive to meanings outside the control of a human will. Paradoxically, compulsive repetition in Beckett, despite its uncomfortable closeness to addiction, harnesses a loss of individual control that proposes a more versatile and ecologically mindful understanding of human action.
Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 38, No. 2, Winter 2015
Watt, Samuel Beckett's "anti-logical" interwar novel, is generally recognized as a parody of the ... more Watt, Samuel Beckett's "anti-logical" interwar novel, is generally recognized as a parody of the binary oppositions that underlie logical systems. is article moves beyond readings of Watt as a pastiche of logical positivism or as the sign of rationalism's exhaustion to argue that the novel's "glitches in logic" initiate a sensual poetics whereby sound-textures come to rival semantic sense. e text does exploit the pitfalls of rational systems, particularly their tendency to elide the body and their inability to code for infinite numbers or emotions, but where the zeros and ones of binary code approach absurdity, different possibilities for meaning emerge. rough references to bodily experience, desires, and ailments, as well as through associations of sounds and laughter, Watt, anticipating characteristics of Beckett's later texts, emphasizes the body as necessary to the construction of meaning in language.
Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui: "Beginning of the Murmur": Archival Pre-Texts and Other Sources, 2015
Beckett’s four nouvelles parody Romantic affinities between human subjectivity and landscape. Set... more Beckett’s four nouvelles parody Romantic affinities between human subjectivity and landscape. Settings become fragmented, de-anthropomorphized and text-like. Since it is impossible to project one’s inner states onto landscape, communication with one’s surroundings is achievable only through idiosyncrasies of habitation: for instance the odd manner in which Beckett’s narrators occupy taxicabs, rooms, sidewalks, boats, and nautical capstans. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau argues that individuals re-appropriate socially organized spaces by “poaching” (braconnage). Such tactics are at play, too, when Beckett’s narrators transform ordinary objects, becoming “poets of their own acts” as their “errant” trajectories subversively remake social space.
The European Legacy, Jan 1, 2011
Comparative Critical Studies, Jan 1, 2012
, formerly entitled -is a bi-annual peer-reviewed international journal in critical theory and li... more , formerly entitled -is a bi-annual peer-reviewed international journal in critical theory and linguistics. It publishes essays and reviews in English and French which explore general critical theory and its application to literature, as well as general and applied linguistics. Website: http://jlsl.upg-ploiesti.ro Editorial Office: UPG
Journal of Modern Literature, 2017
What returns and recurs across Samuel Beckett's art in different media—prose, theater, television... more What returns and recurs across Samuel Beckett's art in different media—prose, theater, television, radio, and film—is resistance to representation. Beckett's work diverges from art that points outside itself to some facet of the familiar world, but neither does it favor abstraction, which is, according to Beckett's commentary in letters and essays, too far removed, sealed against “what is.” How, then, is art to relate to the perceptual and emotional material of “what is”? What techniques, what vision might ensure adequate attention to the complexity of experiential material while protecting its possibilities for remaking itself, perhaps prompted by aesthetic experience? The term Beckett chooses to describe this positioning is “non-relation,” and the essays in The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts suggest a Beckettian art beyond—or better, between—representation and abstraction.
The Heythrop Journal, Jan 1, 2010
Journal of Beckett Studies, Apr 1, 2020
Cette étude interroge les raisons pour lesquelles Samuel Beckett a écrit en français après la Sec... more Cette étude interroge les raisons pour lesquelles Samuel Beckett a écrit en français après la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Son expatriation linguistique signale une ambivalence à l'égard de son paysage d'origine, son identité nationale, sa mère et son maître littéraire, James Joyce. La liberté d'écrire en français mène Beckett à une exploration profonde et personnelle, donnant ainsi naissance à un style littéraire qui accède à ce qui est le plus proche par le biais de ce qui semble le plus étranger.
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Oct 20, 2021
Abstract: An understanding of language as a variant of physical space, developed by the French po... more Abstract: An understanding of language as a variant of physical space, developed by the French post-war thinker, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, offers a point of departure for reading Beckett's late linguistic experimentation, exemplified by Worstward Ho (1983) and ...
Beckett and Embodiment
The abject, decrepit body in Beckett does not signal the impossibility of agency but demands its ... more The abject, decrepit body in Beckett does not signal the impossibility of agency but demands its reconceptualisation. Analysing the body in relation to its environment in Beckett’s work, the author redefines the power to do and act. Separating dynamic interaction from willed intention, Amanda Dennis shows how Beckett’s oeuvre refashions subjectivity in dialogue with a disintegrating environment. The book provides a phenomenological reading of Beckett to argue that sensation and embodiment, by supporting our interactions with our material world, enable possibilities for embodied agency in collaboration with our physical and linguistic surroundings.