June 8th, 2024
BOOK LAUNCH and a meeting with the Author
June 8th, 2024, 5:00 pm
Gabriele Schwab
Moments for Nothing: Samuel Beckett and the End Times
Columbia University Press, publication date: October 2023
With the performance by Christine Dianne Guiyangco
Please join us for the special event, the launch of the book Moments for Nothing: Samuel Beckett and the End Times, and a meeting with the author GABRIELE SCHWAB, on June 8th, at 5:00 pm at Phase Gallery.
Samuel Beckett’s work has entranced generations of readers with its portrayal of the end times. Beckett’s characters are preoccupied with death, and the specters of cataclysm and extinction overshadow their barren, bleak worlds. Yet somehow, they endure, experiencing surreal and often comic repetitions that seem at once to confront finitude and the infinite, up to the limits of existence.
Gabriele Schwab draws on decades of close engagement with Beckett to explore how his work speaks to our current existential anxieties and fears. Interweaving critical analysis with personal reflections, she shows how Beckett’s writing provides unexpected resources for making sense of personal and planetary catastrophes. Moments for Nothing examines the ways Beckett’s works have taken on new meaning in an era of crises—climate change, environmental devastation, and the COVID-19 pandemic—that are defined by both paralyzing stasis and pervasive uncertainty. They also offer a bracing depiction of aging and the end of life, exploring loneliness, vulnerability, and decay. Beckett’s particular vision of the apocalypse and his sense of persistence, Schwab argues, help us understand our times and even, perhaps, provide sanctuary and solace.
Moments for Nothing features insightful close readings of iconic works such as Endgame, Happy Days, and the Trilogy, as well as lesser-known writings including the 35-second play Breath, which Schwab reconsiders in light of the pandemic.
For the introduction to her new book, the author will present several readings and will be available for book signing.
Additionally, engaging with Gabriele Schwab’s scholarship and thinking of planetary end times, Christine Dianne Guiyangco will be performing an interlude that collages Samuel Beckett’s “The Lost Ones,” “The Unnamable,” and “Endgame,” which are some of the texts examined by Schwab in her book, “Moments for Nothing.”
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Gabriele Schwab is a distinguished professor at the University of California, Irvine, where she holds appointments in comparative literature, anthropology, English, and European languages and studies. She is the author of several books, most recently Radioactive Ghosts (2020). Her previous Columbia University Press books are Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (2010) and Imaginary Ethnographies: Literature, Culture, and Subjectivity (2012).
Christine Dianne Guiyangco performing an interlude of collages of Samuel Beckett's texts examined by Schwab in her book.
Clair and Chevalier's Bookstore
