Description
Book SynopsisGabriele Schwab draws on decades of close engagement with Beckett to explore how his work speaks to our current existential anxieties and fears.
Trade ReviewAs a guide to Beckett’s work,
Moments for Nothing is indispensable, but it is also much more than this. Mixing literary criticism with memoir and a compelling account of personal loss and mourning, this is a book unlike any other. What holds together its various elements is a moving and generous tribute to the transformative experience of reading—in which an impassioned love of Beckett’s writing gives shape and meaning to a scholarly life. -- Peter Boxall, author of
The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial LifeWith passion and deep erudition, Gabriele Schwab situates Samuel Beckett in our “end times” of pandemic and climate catastrophe. Here we encounter afresh the writer’s desolate landscapes, dark wit, and ghostly whispers. Here we gratefully consume, alongside his lonely characters, a typically Beckettian meal of despair and hope. -- Elin Diamond, author of
Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and TheatreMoments for Nothing provides perfect readings of Beckett’s prose and plays. Schwab blends elegantly personal reminiscences, psychoanalytical analyses, and philosophical approaches that she distills to demonstrate the relevance of Beckett for our times of angst, pandemics, catastrophe, and looming extinction. Like Beckett’s texts, her book nevertheless uplifts. -- Jean-Michel Rabaté, author of
Think, Pig! Beckett at the Limit of the HumanTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1. Moments for Nothing: Endgame and Its Discontents
2. The Transitional Space Between Life and Death: “The Calmative,” Molloy, and Malone Dies
3. End Times of Subjectivity: The Unnamable
4. “Laughing wildly inmidst severest woe”: Happy Days and the Last Humans
5. Cosmographical Meditations on the In/Human: The Lost Ones
Coda: Breath and the Vicissitudes of Animation
Notes
Bibliography
Index
