ABSTRACT
Beckett's drama stages the potential violence of the search for stable templates of knowledge, identity and classification, revealing the vulnerability of selves to others. In a world of perfectible bodies, Beckett's work insists on the reality of mortality and the limits of embodied life, but does not forge from that a tragic vision, but rather a reimagining of embodiment built on the condition of 'need', vulnerability and mortality. Beckett's work is saturated with the cultural fragments and ghosts of twentieth-century Europe, informed by an extremely broad knowledge of European and classical literary, artistic and philosophical histories. The body is both embedded in the ghost-haunted texture of particular cultural histories and imaginaries, and also continually engaged in a labour of rearticulation, whether intra-cultural or cross-cultural. A consideration of how Beckett's drama is reconstituted in interdisciplinary and intercultural translation and embodiments will transform the approach to Beckett in the twenty-first century.
