Beckett's Counter-Anthropocentric Worlds: Dismantling Dominion

Abstract

This coda reflects on the preceding essays, focusing on Beckett's dismantling of anthropocentric perspectives on human mastery over the earth's resources and other living creatures. I draw on ecocriticism's argument that literature and the arts play an important role in creating new narratives and literary or plastic worlds that defamiliarize the habitual affective, cognitive, perceptual, and sensory frames of readers and audiences in response to rapid and disorientating changes in the conditions of life on earth. As the essays in this issue illuminate in different ways, Beckett's texts construct worlds that resist anthropocentric and capitalist values of progress, growth and consumption, and offer alternative perceptions of space and time that dismantle human dominance and exceptionalism. At the same time, the tenderness and compassion in his work for the heightened vulnerability and precarity of human and more-than-human life also offers a revised mode of interaction with our fellow creatures and a planet in crisis. Beckett's work has often been reframed in different philosophical, aesthetic, or political contexts, and this volume demonstrates its potential to speak to the major issue of our time, that of ecological crisis, through its tendency to shift scale from the miniscule to the cosmological, and to undermine or unravel assumptions about the place of the human in relation to other creatures in a finite, dying environment.