SCHOLARSHIP
My research interrogates the body’s implication within its natural and built environments; I focus on modernist and late modernist literature in Europe, particularly the work of Samuel Beckett.
Books
Beckett and Embodiment: Body, Space, Agency (July 2021, Edinburgh University Press)
This book argues that the abject, decrepit body in Beckett does not signal the impossibility of agency but demands its reconceptualisation. Analysing the representation of the body in relation to the environment in Beckett’s work, the author interrogates 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 support our interactions with our material world, enabling possibilities for embodied agency in collaboration with our physical and linguistic surroundings.
Purchase options:
Edited Collections
Samuel Beckett and the Nonhuman / Samuel Beckett et le non-humain, edited by Amanda Dennis, Thomas Thoelen, Douglas Atkinson and Sjef Houppermans.
Articles (selected)
“Ordinary Language in Dystopia: Adapting Beckett’s Endgame,” Journal of Beckett Studies, 29.1 (2020), pp. 103-106.
“Compulsive Bodies, Creative Bodies: Beckett and Agency in the 21st Century,” Journal of Beckett Studies 27.1 (2018), pp. 5-21.
“Radical Indecision: Aporia as Metamorphosis in The Unnamable,” Journal of Beckett Studies 24.2 (2015), pp. 180-197.
“Glitches in Logic in Beckett’s Watt: Toward a Sensory Poetics,” Journal of Modern Literature, 38.2 (2015), pp. 103-116.
“Poets of Their Own Acts: Tactics, Style and Occupation in Beckett’s Nouvelles,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 27 (2015), pp. 43-55.
“Dithyrambs and Ploughshares: The Cycle of Creation and Criticism in Nietzsche’s Aesthetics,” The European Legacy 16.4 (2011), pp. 469-485.
Book Chapters (selected)
“Samuel Beckett et la langue maternelle: l’ambivalence et expatriation linguistique,” Samuel Beckett et la culture française (Éditions Minard, 2019) pp. 95-114.
“Uncertain Humanisms: Energies of Environment in Beckett, Bowen and Merleau-Ponty,” Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2018) pp. 227-240.
“Hetetopias: The possible and real in Foucault, Beckett and Calvino,” The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space, (Taylor & Francis, 2017) pp. 168-178.
“On Roaming in The Lost Ones: Embodiment and Virtual Space,” Beckett and the ‘State’ of Ireland, ed. Alan Graham and Scott Eric Hamilton (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017) pp. 127-146.
Book Reviews (selected)
“Think Pig! Beckett at the Limit of the Human” (review of Jean-Michel Rabaté), The Beckett Circle (Spring 2019), pp. 1-3
“A Theater of the Nerves: Samuel Beckett’s Non-Representational Art” (review of the Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts, edited by S.E. Gontarski), Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Summer 2017), pp. 134 143.
“Between the Body and the World: Merleau-Ponty and the Rehabilitation of the Sensible” (review of Scott L. Marratto, The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity), Word and Text Vol. 3, No. 2, 2013, pp. 181-186.