Introduction : Endlessness of Ending: Samuel Beckett and Extensions of the Mind

Any contemporary discussion on Beckett and the mind cannot sidestep the so-called ‘cognitive turn’ in literary studies. With a shift of emphasis from psychology and psychoanalysis to neuro-cognitivism in the literary-critical field, the psychic question around literary works can now be posed from a more diverse set of perspectives than ever before. This collection aims at studying these various treatments that nuance the effect of Beckett’s works as they pass through these perspectives, programmes and models. It is not that Beckett’s work smoothly passes through these approaches. More often than not, it counter-signs, encapsulates and pressurises them, offering an exciting dialectic of critical perspectives and textual praxis. Irrespective of the much-debated speculation about the mind being entirely transmissible to the brain, as IT (Identity Theory) would claim; we can nevertheless state that there is an imaginative mental extension of the brain in the working of literature. Even if there is no material presence of the ‘mental’ as such, the mind is an imaginative (and imaginary) extension of the brain as corporealised thinking. Elizabeth Barry, Ulrika Maude and Laura Salisbury have recently argued in their introduction to the special Beckett issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities that brain is the “site where mind and body are most insistently implicated” (2016). ‘Medical humanities’ has indeed become a significant framework to probe into brain functioning in Beckett from a variety of strategies involving both literary and medical history. From a literary-aesthetic point of view, we can say that the mind is what brain - the physical organ - ‘thinks’ by way of corporeal extensionality and projection. In other words, mind is the thought of the brain and it doesn’t matter whether it actually exists as long as literature generates it by way of creative imagination. In this collection, we are interested in exploring Beckett’s texts in various mediums as complex extensions of the mind that not only map the mind on the page or the stage but also show a critical awareness in signalling a withdrawal of the mental from the projected space.