Beckett and Buddhism

Description

Beckett and Buddhism undertakes a twenty-first-century reassessment of the Buddhist resonances in Samuel Beckett's writing. These reverberations, as Angela Moorjani demonstrates, originated in his early reading of Schopenhauer. Drawing on letters and archives along with recent studies of Buddhist thought and Schopenhauer's knowledge of it, the book charts the Buddhist concepts circling through Beckett's visions of the 'human predicament' in a blend of tears and laughter. Moorjani offers an in-depth elucidation of texts that are shown to intersect with the negative and paradoxical path of the Buddha, which she sets in dialogue with Western thinking. She brings further perspectives from cognitive philosophy and science to bear on creative emptiness, the illusory 'I', and Beckett's probing of the writing process. Readers will benefit from this far-reaching study of one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century who explored uncharted topologies in his fiction, theatre, and poetry.

Angela Moorjani is Professor Emerita of Modern Languages and Intercultural Pragmatics at the University of Maryland-UMBC. She has extensively explored the multidimensional writings of Samuel Beckett in her many publications. In her other books and articles, she investigates the effects of trauma and mourning on modernist writers and artists.

'Readers interested in the transmission of Eastern thought in modernist texts will find this exploration of the congruence of Beckett's texts with Buddhist thought useful and informative ... Recommended.' J. S. Baggett, Choice Connect