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journal contribution
posted on 2022-01-28, 15:06 authored by Jeff WallaceThis article stages a process of self-conscious critical assessment and reassessment around the proposition that Samuel Beckett’s 1938 Murphy is a novel intimately concerned with peace. Building on the pacifistic orientation of the posthumanist intellectual projects of Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, it uses Murphy as a means of inquiring into what a literary textual practice founded on a posthumanistic ethics of peace might look like. It locates in Murphy forms of agency and animism that dismantle the human-nonhuman divide and suggest affinities between modernist experimentalism and lines of thought in Latour’s work that lead to “compositionism.” It also finds in posthumanism a general apologetics around the dismantling of “critique” and anthropocentrism, opening up textual practice to the admission of vulnerability, naïveté, error, and playfulness, which allows various readings of Murphy’s peaceability to be assembled and assimilated together beyond a hermeneutic of suspicion
History
Published in
Twentieth-Century LiteraturePublisher
Duke University PressVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Citation
Wallace, J. (2015) 'Murphy and peace', Twentieth-Century Literature, 61(3), pp.352-372Print ISSN
0041-462XElectronic ISSN
2325-8101Cardiff Met Affiliation
- Cardiff School of Education and Social Policy
Copyright Holder
- © The Publisher
Language
- en