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(2013) The haptic aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's drama, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
There are significant moments of physical touch presented in the two plays discussed in this final chapter. In Ohio Impromptu (1980), the listener reaches out to check the reader's hand, influencing the course of the narrative he reads. In Nacht und Träume (1982), a caring touch is dreamt by a sleeping figure as the strains of Schubert's musical piece by the same name are heard. While Ohio Impromptu's staging of the book and the act of reading indicate that continued attention to the relationship between text and performance is necessary, the fact that an act of physical touch happens during the course of the play seems to ask the following question: under what conditions, ethical and aesthetic, can touch happen in the often sterile, lonely landscape of the Beckettian stage?
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Full citation:
McTighe, T. (2013). On the other hand … (the one that refuses to touch), in The haptic aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's drama, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 133-150.
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