Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. vii viii Contents 5 The Prosthetic Voice Beckett, Derrida, telecommunication Communication over distance: The Unnamable and How It Is The prosthetic voice and the ghostly The interpenetration between the material and the immaterial Notes References Index First and foremost I would like to thank my former supervisor, Steven Connor, for working with me on the research project that formed the basis of this book. I am happy to have been part of the growing body of what I like to call 'the Steven Connor School'. My thanks also go to Mary Bryden and Andrew Gibson, whose warm encouragement and incisive comments helped me a great deal. I have benefited much from associating with several members of the London Beckett Seminar. In particular I am grateful to Daniela Caselli for giving me extremely timely advice, without which I might not have published this book.
Before going to London I studied English literature at the University of Tokyo. I decided to do so simply because the late Yasunari Takahashi, the founder of Beckett studies in Japan, was teaching there. My debt to him, both academic and personal, is beyond words. I strongly wish I could show him this modest fruit of my research. I have also been given considerable help by my fellow members of the Samuel Beckett Research Circle in Japan. I would especially thank Minako Okamuro for reading a large part of the typescript and offering useful suggestions. I should also point out that I was in part aided by the Japanese Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research.
Despite its old age, my IBM Think Pad served me to the end as a positive prosthesis. Last but not least, I express my heart-felt gratitude to my wife and children for their support.
The author and publishers wish to thank John Calder Ltd for permission to quote from Dream of Fair to Middling Women and The Unnamable. Much shorter versions of Chapters 1 and 3 appeared in the journal Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd 'hui, vols 11 (2001) and 12 (2002), and a condensed Japanese version of Chapter 4 appeared as a chapter in The Vision and Movement of Samuel Beckett (ed. Kojin Kondo; Tokyo: Michitani, 2005). The author and publisher are grateful for permission to reprint those works here. YOSHIKI TAJIRI ix [hereafter, OED], definition 1). This meaning is closely related to the fact that at that time the invention of quotation marks had begun to disrupt the continuity of the written (printed) word and change textual form. The spread of printing technology brought about the technologisation of the word and text, and Wills calls it 'prosthesis' (222). 'Prosthesis' in its original sense, which implies dislocation of the continuity of the word, was possible only on the artificial typographic page. Parallel to this technologisation of the word, in the field of medicine, the Frenchman Ambroise Paré -Wilson's contemporary -was challenging the assumed wholeness of the body by inventing artificial limbs. This change was based on a mechanical conception of the body that was to be systematised by Descartes in the next century. Although it was not until 1706 that 'prosthesis' in the medical sense was first used in English, 8 it seems significant that in the sixteenth century, medicine and rhetoric were going through a similar transformation in relation to prosthesis. The intellectual milieu in which the word prosthesis was first used thus reminds us of the underlying interrelation between the rhetorical or linguistic dimension and the medical or physical one.
My idea of the 'prosthetic body' in Beckett's work concerns prosthesis in the physical, and now more ordinary, sense of the word. However, prosthesis in the original linguistic sense may not be entirely irrelevant to our discussion of Beckett's work. If we depart from the specific historical circumstances in respect of printing technology and enlarge the idea of the linguistic prosthesis, we can discuss his work precisely in such terms. In his work there is alienation of language as well as of the body. This is most obvious in The Unnamable. The narrator of this novel is compelled to speak on, even though he feels that his voice and words are not his own. Words are both his and the other's at the same time. Language here is prosthetic in the sense that it is both inside and outside. As the Derrida-inspired critics of Beckett have noted, the situation here, in which the subject is never guaranteed self-identity and is constantly displaced from itself, can be fruitfully discussed in terms of Derrida's différance, which Wills also regards as prosthesis (31). And Wills would probably discuss the language in The Unnamable in reference to prosthesis. The relentless alienation of the subject described in this novel can therefore be taken to involve the linguistic dimension as well as the physical one. I will examine the Derridean interpretation of The Unnamable in Chapter 5 in relation to the question of the voice. But in order not to overgeneralise the concept of prosthesis, I will not highlight the conjunction of the two dimensions of prosthesis in the way Wills would with his equation of différance with prosthesis.

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zlib/Poetry/American Poetry/Yoshiki Tajiri/Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Senses in Modernism_2685882.pdf

Macmillan Publishers Limited

Palgrave Macmillan Limited

Macmillan Education UK

Campbell Books Ltd

Springer Nature

Red Globe Press

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

Place of publication not identified, 2014

Basingstoke [England] ; New York, 2007

Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2007

Basingstoke, 2006

Jan 01, 2007

London, 2006

2, 20061122

lg1476497

producers:
Acrobat Distiller 10.1.15 (Windows)

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Source title: Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Senses in Modernism

This book studies the representation of the body in Beckett's work, focusing on the 'prosthetic' aspect of the organs and senses. While making use of the theoretical potential of the concept of 'prosthesis', it aims to resituate Beckett in the broad cultural context of modernism in which the impact of new media and technologies was registered. Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body is a study of the representation of the body in Samuel Beckett's work (both novel and plays), specifically focused on the 'prosthetic' aspects of the organs and senses. Referring to the indeterminate border between the body and material objects, inside and outside, self and other, the concept of prosthesis is gaining weight in contemporary critical discourses. While making use of the theoretical potential of this concept, Tajiri attempts to highlight palpably physical aspects of the Beckettian body. In the process Beckett's work is newly situated in the broad cultural context of modernism in which the impact of new media and technologies was profoundly registered. As a whole, a comprehensive perspective is given on such diverse topics as the mechanisation of the body, the foregrounding of the bodily boundaries and orfices, synaesthesia, the camera eye and the mechanically reproduced voice

Cover 1
Contents 6
Acknowledgements 8
Introduction 9
1 The Prosthetic Body and Sexuality 21
The masturbation machine in Dream of Fair to Middling Women 21
Beckett and the bachelor machine 27
The attempt to dam up flows 32
The machine and sexuality in Beckett’s later work 38
2 The Question of Boundaries 48
The body parts as prostheses 49
Confusion of the organs 55
The instability of the body’s surface 62
A critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions of Beckett 71
3 The Prosthetic Body and Synaesthesia 83
Fragmentation of the body and synaesthesia 84
Technology and the transformation of the senses: three theories 91
Synaesthesia in Beckett’s early work 99
Synaesthesia in Beckett’s later work 109
4 The Camera Eye 117
Beckett and the cinema 118
The camera eye/the naked eye 124
The double and self-reflexivity 130
Ill Seen Ill Said 141
5 The Prosthetic Voice 146
Beckett, Derrida, telecommunication 148
Communication over distance: The Unnamable and How It Is 153
The prosthetic voice and the ghostly 159
The interpenetration between the material and the immaterial 164
Notes 177
References 198
Index 205
A 205
B 205
C 205
D 205
E 206
F 206
G 206
H 206
I 206
J 206
K 206
L 206
M 207
N 207
O 207
P 207
Q 207
R 207
S 207
T 207
U 208
V 208
W 208

"Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body is a study of the representation of the body in Samuel Beckett's work (both novels and plays), specifically focusing on the 'prosthetic' aspects of the organs and senses. Referring to the indeterminate border between the body and material objects, inside and outside, self and other, the concept of prosthesis is gaining weight in contemporary critical discourses. While making use of the theoretical potential of this concept, Tajiri attempts to highlight palpably physical aspects of the Beckettian body."--Jacket

This book studies the representation of the body in Beckett's work, focusing on the 'prosthetic' aspect of the organs and senses. While making use of the theoretical potential of the concept of 'prosthesis', it aims to resituate Beckett in the broad cultural context of modernism in which the impact of new media and technologies was registered.
Erscheinungsdatum: 01.01.2007

Front Matter....Pages i-ix
Introduction....Pages 1-12
The Prosthetic Body and Sexuality....Pages 13-39
The Question of Boundaries....Pages 40-74
The Prosthetic Body and Synaesthesia....Pages 75-108
The Camera Eye....Pages 109-137
The Prosthetic Voice....Pages 138-168
Back Matter....Pages 169-200

2016-03-14