Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature- Cluttered Universes of Samuel Beckett and Tadeusz Kantor

Cluttered Universes brings Kantor’s and Beckett’s texts, theatres, and theories into conversation with deconstruction, new materialism, environmental humanities, and posthumanism. It reads their artistic universes as “cluttered” with matter, objects, and other nonhuman visitors. Cluttered Universes of Samuel Beckett and Tadeusz Kantor is a collection of four essays bringing Kantor’s and Beckett’s texts, theatres, and theories into conversation with deconstruction, new materialism, environmental humanities, and posthumanism. This book is dedicated to two artists rarely discussed together to see how their awareness of poetics and performativity of matter might help us understand our connection to the material world, even if the world is falling apart. Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton, and others pave the way for new critical interpretations of canonical works, which are recognised as universes “cluttered” with matter, objects, things, and other nonhuman visitors of seemingly exclusive human domains. Kisiel shows that Beckett’s and Kantor’s carefulness and care for imagining nonhuman/human relationships might refresh our understanding of memory, togetherness, death, or even the end of the world for the Anthropocene.