Archived News | Return to News Center

March 30, 2012

ULM's Giles has chapter published in work remembering Samuel Beckett

Dr. Jana M. Giles, assistant professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, recently published a book chapter in a work titled "Beckett Re-Membered: After the Centenary."

The text was edited by James Carney, Michael O'Sullivan, Leonard Madden, and Karl White and published by Cambridge Scholars Press in Newcastle Upon Tyne, U.K.

Her chapter, "The Aesthetics of the Dispossessed: Sublime Vagrancy in Beckett and Wordsworth," uses aesthetic theories of the picturesque and the sublime and the status of vagrancy to compare and contrast Irish writer Samuel Beckett's short story "The End" with English writer William Wordsworth's poems "Resolution and Independence" and the blind beggar scene in Book VII of "The Prelude."

Giles reads "The End" as a retrospective commentary on the utopianism and solipsism of Wordsworth's romanticism to conclude that Beckett's modernist and post-modernist sensibilities grew out of a deep affinity for Romanticism, albeit in elegiac form and critical of its aesthetics and politics.

The chapter arose out of a conference paper presented at an international, interdisciplinary conference on Samuel Beckett at University College Cork in Cork, Ireland, in July 2006.

The conference was titled "100 Years A-Dying: A Post-Mortem on the Work of Samuel Beckett" and celebrated the centenary birth of Samuel Beckett, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.

PLEASE NOTE: Some links and e-mail addresses in these archived news stories may no longer work, and some content may include events which are no longer relevent, or reference individuals and/or organizations no longer associated with ULM.