“‘Idle Talk, Idle Talk, Idle Talk’: Samuel Beckett, Anglo-Ireland, and Heideggerian Thought”

Graham Price

doi:10.24162/EI2021-9972

Authors

Graham Price Maynooth University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24162/EI2021-9972

Keywords:

Anglo-Irish, Beckett, continental philosophy, Heidegger, Irish drama, Irish History, Irish Literature, Psychoanalysis

Abstract

This essay analyses Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy and Waiting for Godot through the enabling theoretical lens of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. Special attention shall be paid to key Heideggerian concepts: idle talk, authenticity, and inauthenticity. A Heideggerian reading of Beckett’s influential middle period allows for a rich exploration of how his works provide a vision of the psychological state of the formerly powerful Anglo-Irish in post-independence Ireland. A Beckettian reading of Heidegger demonstrates how Heideggerian thought has been at the forefront of elucidating key challenges posed in the Twentieth Century concerning ways of being-in-the-world and being-with-others that allows for the authenticity of individual subjectivities.

Author Biography

Graham Price, Maynooth University

Graham Price currently lectures in the Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University and the Department of English, Drama, and Film in UCD. He lectured in modern Irish and British Literature at the University of Limerick from 2015-2018. He has supervised B.A. and M.A. theses on film studies, queer theory, Irish studies, and Irish drama. His monograph, Oscar Wilde and Contemporary Irish Drama: Learning to be Oscar’s Contemporary, was published in 2018 and is the first book-length examination of the Wildean strand in contemporary Irish theatre. He has published widely on Irish drama, Irish literature, continental philosophy, and queer theory in journals such as Irish Studies Review, New Hibernia Review, Irish University Review, Reading Ireland, and Etudes Irlandeses. He currently directs two annual summer study abroad academic programs on Irish literature for the University of California (Berkeley) and Bucknell University at University College Dublin. Price’s co-written book (with Darragh Greene), Film Directors and Emotion: An Affective Turn in Contemporary American Cinema, was published in June 2020 by McFarland Press. In 2022, Price organised (with Casey Lawrence) the Wilde/Joyce symposium which was held in Trinity College Dublin that May. He is currently writing the textbook Beginning Irish Studies for Manchester University Press which will be published in 2025.

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“‘Idle Talk, Idle Talk, Idle Talk’: Samuel Beckett, Anglo-Ireland, and Heideggerian Thought”

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Graham Price, Maynooth University

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