McTighe P. The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. — 196 p. — ISBN10: 1137276983; ISBN13: 978-1137276988.McTighe, in an elegantly written, wide-ranging study of Beckett's dramas, focusing mainly on the late plays but relevant to his entire corpus, provides an original and much-needed way of approaching the complex issues related to Beckett's depiction of bodies - at once material yet intangible, solid yet fragmented, there yet not there - and the equally complex issues arising from such tensions and contradictions. Building on theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy, McTighe argues for the importance of the haptic or tactile in approaching not only the physical but also the philosophical, religious, ethical, artistic, and performative forms and failures of contacts and connections through touch in Beckett's works. In carefully-argued close readings of selected plays, divided into chapters according to a particular sensory organ of touch - eye, ear, mouth, skin, hand - she illustrates how Beckett creates bodies as material presences which deny the possibilities of their own materiality, as delineations which ultimately point to the impossibility of delineation of somatic experience in art and life [Linda Ben-Zvi].Introduction: Haptics, Aesthetics, PhilosophyEye: Failing, Myopic, Grainy
Ear: Full of Relentless Echoes
Mouth: Trying to Tell It All, Failing
Skin, Space, Place
On the One Hand … (The One That Writes the Body)
On the Other Hand … (The One That Refuses to Touch)Conclusion. Departing Bodies: Between Doubting Thomas and Noli me Tangere