What happens when we read the Irish literary canon for energy? We find numerous mentions of wind power, solar power, petrol, coal, peat, gas, and dung, and we find these energy resources and infrastructures trellised into plot lines and character arcs in some unexpected ways in Irish literature, from Joyce and Beckett to Heaney and McCormack. What emerges is a partial but suggestive cognitive map – of Irish energy economies, ecologies, and phenomenologies – that reveals Ireland’s unique energy signature and at the same time links Ireland to other imperial and global regimes of petromodernity.

1. This chapter explores hitherto unacknowledged influences, including McLuhan and Ong, on Dusklands. New light is shed on the novels manuscript origins and its relation to satire.

3. This chapter considers Waiting for the Barbarians with relation to a thematics of impasse and bafflement. It argues Coetzee designed the novel to stall the emergence of meaning.

Dublin: A Writer’s City begins with a personal introduction, in which the author reflects on his arrival in the city in the mid-1980s, and his realization during his very first hours there that he was living a few doors down from where Oscar Wilde had been born, on a street that features in Ulysses, in the stories of Samuel Beckett, and in the poetry of Thomas Kinsella – and around the corner from the site of the first production of what would become the Abbey Theatre. This initial stroll down an apparently innocuous street – Westland Row – provides the basis for a reflection on the ways in which being aware of the literature of a city influence our experience of urban living. These reflections are framed in the context of the empty city during the pandemic that began in the spring of 2020.

Sometimes, a geographical feature can stamp itself on the character of a place. In the case of the south coast of Dublin, the expanse of sea and sky has led more than one writer to ask – in more than one way – “am I walking into eternity on Sandymount Strand?” (as Joyce’s character Stephen Dedalus puts it in Ulysses). It was here that the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney lived and wrote for many years, just down the coast from the Martello tower that features in Ulysses. A little further along the coast again is the pier at Dún Laoghaire, associated with a pivotal passage in Samuel Beckett’s work. Even as it looks outwards, however, Dublin’s south coast has a long association with wealth and privilege, from the secluded villas of the eighteenth century to the property boom of the early twenty-first century. This is reflected in work extending from Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee to contemporary fiction by Maeve Binchy, Marian Keyes, and the satire of Paul Howard, and the number of contemporary Dublin crime novels associated with the area.

In 1922, a year that saw the publication of landmark works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the sixth-form student Samuel Beckett read plays by William Shakespeare. His copies of editions of Shakespeare’s plays like the one of Macbeth1 contain many underlined or marked passages, but the reading trace very often found in their margins is: ‘Learn by heart’.2

The second chapter begins with a consideration of Beckett’s resistance to the logic of quid pro quo, which, organizing life in the metropolis, impoverishes the imagination. Beckett discovers in listing a form to counteract that urge to calculate. Against older readings of Beckett, recent French readers such as Pascale Casanova and Alain Badiou find the Irish writer revolutionary, associating him with beginnings, resistance, and even happiness. Similarly, I claim that Beckett’s works are surprisingly recuperative. The high modernists used the stream-of-consciousness to emphasize the evanescence and meaninglessness of present action. Transferring that technique to the past tense, Beckett records dissipating practices of everyday life. What’s more, Beckett’s garbled lists provoke readers to impose sense by drawing upon a shared cultural grammar. Beckett’s verbal hoarding makes conceivable a collective bound by shared axioms that reduce abstract multiplicities into knowable situations. Beckett thus posits infranational communities that are consolidated not by institutionally underwritten concepts such as nationality or ethnicity but by remembered practices of everyday life.

The revolutionary significance of Must We Mean What We Say?, Stanley Cavell’s first book and the best introduction to his thought, becomes increasingly evident fifty years after its publication, confronting us with newly relevant, transformative thinking about modernism, the idea of culture, ordinary language philosophy, the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, American philosophy, the 1960s, Wittgenstein, Rawls, Kant, Kierkegaard, Beckett, Shakespeare, and such eternal philosophical themes as truth, passion, utterance, self-knowledge, skepticism, and the value of criticism. Cavell’s intervention in ordinary language philosophy revolutionized its practice, overcoming its dogmas and challenging the analytic tradition from within, broadening its audiences. His focus on self-confrontation as central to philosophical practice, the shepherding of ordinary utterances into uses within forms of life, shows that the philosophical preconditions of democratic thinking lie in the embedding of meaning in everyday life, rooted in the ethical and aesthetic aspects of how we mean what we say.

Cavell’s problematic concerning the art critic is taken to mistake imposing upon for finding meaning in an artwork, reading into it for hearing it out. Modernist artworks must diverge from traditional forms of expression and thus toward hermeticism to achieve their voices. If an artwork remains too close to tradition, it becomes automatic and thereby fails to achieve its voice. If an artwork moves too far into hermeticism, it becomes silent and thereby fails to achieve its voice. The critic discerns both what an artwork says and whether it speaks at all. Because the critic cannot fulfill these tasks simply by appeal to tradition or the artist’s intentions, she must interview the work itself with her own devices to identify elements in the work as keys to unlock its voice. Her vindication, however, comes not from a final analysis, but from the clarity she brings to the work, which is always subject to contestation. As the world becomes increasingly multicultural, we increasingly encounter unfamiliar people bearing complex relations to unfamiliar forms of life, heightening the challenge of hearing others out; as Cavell notes, our ways of regarding artworks resemble those of other people.

Samuel Beckett was a central influence on Stoppard, not only in early works like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Jumpers that show direct links; in Beckett, Stoppard discovered his dramatic principles and the foundation of his humour.

This chapter follows on from the last to trace the development of the prosthetic modernism discernible at the turn of the twentieth century, as it works through the modernist novel from Proust, Joyce, Stein and Woolf up to the extended late modernist work of Samuel Beckett. The chapter reads Beckett’s reception of Proustian and Joycean modernism, from his novels of the thirties and forties up to his late work Company and suggests that this reception might best be understood as a poetics of twining. Beckett offers an extended reflection on the ways in which the modernist novel performs a mode of twining, a joining together of mind with prosthetic extension; but he also enacts a specific form of untwining, which demonstrates how the novel has always shown the unbound, the disaggregated, to be a constituent part of the terms in which it conducts its binding properties.