Vulnerable Landscapes

Abstract This article focuses on Samuel Beckett’s selected short prose works “The Lost Ones” and “Ping,” which both present ruinous landscapes that have witnessed an unspeakable catastrophe. Both texts attempt to reflect such deterioration in the collapse of language. Following environmental criticism and new materialism, this paper analyses Beckett’s texts as potential representatives of a poetics for the Anthropocene. Such a project withdraws from evoking spectacular images of an ecocide witnessed by narrators unaffected by the deteriorating reality; instead, it grasps the necessary crisis of narration as a part of a world that is falling apart.