Confinement and Limits of the Human: Reviews of Undoing Time and Think, Pig!

Jennifer Birkett's book Undoing Time provides close readings of selected works from Samuel Beckett's oeuvre along with a narrative account of key events in Beckett's life. Such events influenced Beckett's lifelong interest in language. As Birkett argues, Beckett was able, through his writings, to challenge life as confinement, or as "doing time." Jean-Michel Rabaté's Think, Pig! offers a new perspective on the ethical aspect of Samuel Beckett's oeuvre. As a challenge to a humanist understanding of Beckett's work, Rabaté traces the artist's development from a young Joycean to his decision to inhabit a new language of 'the low' that reiterates the obligation to speak at the limits of the human—a language that is key to Beckett's ethics of nonrelation. Both monographs are important contributions to Beckett studies, and will be rewarding to Beckett scholars as well as non-specialist scholars.