Ulrika Maude: Samuel Beckett and Medicine

This online event will celebrate the publication of Ulrika Maude’s groundbreaking new book, Samuel Beckett and Medicine (Cambridge UP, 2025), with responses from Doug Battersby, Molly Crozier, and Andre Furlani.

Samuel Beckett and Medicine offers the first sustained analysis of the author’s abiding interest in medicine and medical discourses, advancing insights into the representation of illness, neurodiversity, disability, ageing, and dying in his work. It analyses Beckett’s representation of the production of language, offering new ways of understanding the often perplexing formal and stylistic experimentation of his work.

The book addresses the many automatic and habitual functions staged in his writing and considers the impact of nerve theory, reflexes, affect, and the viscera on his work. It advances new readings of Beckett’s poetry, prose, and television and stage plays, drawing on his reading notes on medicine and psychology, and on his correspondence and critical writings. Through its refusal to aestheticize embodied experience or to yield to the metaphysical consolations of literature, Beckett’s work challenges us to confront the intricacies of embodied being and to encounter the question of finitude.

Ulrika Maude is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Bristol, where she also directs the Centre for Health, Humanities and Science. She is author of Beckett, Technology and the Body (2009) and co-editor of Beckett and Phenomenology (2009), The Body and the Arts (2009), The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature (2015) and The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature (2018). She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Beckett Studies.

Doug Battersby is a Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Leicester. He is the author of Troubling Late Modernism: Ethics, Feeling, and the Novel Form (Oxford, 2022), a study of how postwar novelists (including Samuel Beckett) at once reinvent and ethically problematise modernist narrative forms.

Molly Crozier is an early-career researcher in Comparative Literature and French Studies, with interests in Samuel Beckett, disability, gender and embodiment. She is currently Honorary Fellow in Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool, and is working on a monograph provisionally entitled Embodied Interdependence: Samuel Beckett, Disability and Care.

Andre Furlani is Professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal. Among his publications on Samuel Beckett are the books Pilgrim’s Gress: The Beckett Walk and Beckett after Wittgenstein. He is the author as well of Guy Davenport: Postmodern and After and of the forthcoming Foot Notes: Contemporary Walking Literature.