“‘These old P.M.s are gruesome’: Post-mortem Poetics in Beckett’s Late Plays”

Abstract

The essay examines Beckett’s affiliation with the concept of lateness and lastness and it offers an original reading of What Where by focusing on its enigmatic opening line “we are the last five”. In te light of Beckett's  “rip word” Beckett’s figures appears  as “post-human to the extent that they are posthumous, in the etymological sense of last, or of coming after (from posterus, posterior).