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Preliminary Material -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- "Happily melancholy": Pleasure and Pain in Early Beckett /Mark Nixon -- Mourning Becomes Electric: Mediating Loss in Eh Joe /Graley Herren -- Beckettian Pain, In the Flesh: Singularity, Community and "the work" /Garin Dowd -- The Body in Pain and Freedom of the Mind: Performing Beckett and Noh /Mariko Hori Tanaka -- "Frankly now is, there pain?": Beckett, Medicine and the Composition of Pain /Peter Fifield -- Strange Pain: Archive, Trauma and Testimony in Samuel Beckett and Christian Boltanski /David Houston Jones -- Everyday Life and the Pain of Existence in Happy Days /Yoshiki Tajiri -- "We have our being in justice": Samuel Beckett's How It Is /Jonathan Boulter -- "That or Groan": Paining and De-paining in Beckett /Mary Bryden -- The Appearance of the Human at the Limit of Representation: Beckett and Pain in the Experience of Language /Michiko Tsushima -- Contributors -- Index. Samuel Beckett and Pain is a collection of ten essays which explores the theme of pain in Beckett’s works. Experiencing both physical and psychological pain in the course of his life, Beckett found suffering in human life inevitable, accepted it as a source of inspiration in his writings, and probed it to gain deeper insight into the difficult and emotionally demanding processes of artistic creation, practice and performance. Acknowledging the recent developments in the study of pain in literature and culture, this volume explores various aspects of pain in Beckett’s works, a subject which has been heretofore only sporadically noted. The topics discussed include Beckett’s aesthetics and pain, pain as loss and trauma, pain in relation to palliation, pain at the experience of the limit, pain as archive, and pain as part of everyday life and language. This volume is characterized by its plural, interdisciplinary perspectives covering the fields of literature, theatre, art, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. By suggesting more diverse paths in Beckett studies, the authors hope to make a lasting contribution to contemporary literary studies and other relevant fields
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