A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J

L-Z

 Aaslestad, Petter

 I’m a professor of Scandinavian literature at the University of Trondheim, Norway. At the moment I'm the dean of the Faculty of Arts. I wrote a ‘magister-thesis’ in 1984 about the beckettian trilogy, and published several articles about the author later on. I have been opponent by the defence of doctoral thesis, concerning Beckett in Norway and Denmark. I also have written books on modernism, narratology 19th century Scandinavian prose

 "Dante and the Lobster" and the classical short story tradition

  "Dante and the Lobster" which is part of the collection More Pricks than Kicks, was by benevolent contemporary critics regarded as part of the Fielding-, Sterne,- Joyce tradition. The collection is demanding; for the reader to be able to follow it, a certain cultural competence of which the fewest ideally are in possession of, is expected. The contract between the author and the reader in Beckett’s early prose presupposes that the reader inhabits these same standards to be able to understand the literary and cultural references. My reading of "Dante and the Lobster" will reasonably not depend on my own degree of extensive reading and thus capacity of recognising bait laid out by the narrative authority. It is however striking how the short story to a great extent makes use of conventional "un-Beckett-ian" narrative devices, in tradition with the 19^th century’s Realistic prose. This aspect of Beckett’s prose hasn’t been emphasised by critics. "Dante and the Lobster" includes a number of indications of genre that make it reasonable to regard it as part of the great classical short story tradition from Boccaccio and the German 19^th century. The starting point for the short story is Belacquas’ trivial doings any given, indifferent day, until the incidental event- the boiling of the lobster- provides an opening towards the possibility of interpreting existence’s greater questions on life and death- completely in line with the classical short story tradition, but essentially different from Beckett’s later more repeated structures within a self-explanatory universe.

The Fine Art of Saying Nothing: Samuel Beckett and the Theory and Practice of Narrative Gaps

Much of the theory of narrative is taken up, explicitly or implicitly, with the subject of narrative gaps, those empty spaces that far exceed the words or images of the text. The subject encompasses cornerstone topics of narratology (characterization, montage) and has seen much variety of analytic distinction. Most of the work on how gaps operate has turned on the reader¹s role in filling these gaps - how, as Wolfgang Iser put it in what was basically a book about gaps (The Implied Reader), the reader "enters into the text, forming ... connections and conceptions and so creating the configurative meaning" of the narrative. In fact, without such activity, there would be no story at all. My argument is, first, that Beckett¹s work is no exception to this rule. Much of its artistry and great power depend on it. But the other part of my argument is that there is a species of gap, at once venerable and rare, that Beckett experimented with repeatedly in the work of the 1940s, and that stands much of this theorizing on its head.

Ackerley, Chris

 Chris Ackerley is Associate Professor in English, at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. He is author of numerous works on Beckett including The Annotated Murphy and is currently working on an Encyclopedia of Samuel Beckett with Stan Gontarski.

 "Samuel Beckett and Max Nordau: Degeneration, the Bloody Rafflesia, Sausage-Poisoning, Coenaesthesia and the Not-I."

 John Pilling's recent edition of Beckett's "Dream Notebook" has revealed much about the early Beckett's habits of reading. One of the authors whom he read in perhaps surprising detail was Max Nordau, whose study of degeneration was popular in its day but has since been dismissed as pernicious. In this paper I trace the evidence of Beckett's reading of Nordau, and scrutinise the use made of it in his own writings. A number of images of decay in Beckett have their direct roots in Nordau (the bloody rafflesia of 'Enueg I' and The Unnamable), but more provocative is the argument that some of Beckett's intricate perceptions (coenaesthesia) and persistent themes (the Not-I) are implicated in this "reading for writing" process. This is not to suggest Beckett's degeneracy but to document yet again his curious use of sources which are as unexpectedly relished as theyare antithetical to his persuasion .

Aland, John

After fulfilling  an Art Teachers Scholarship and teaching art at all levels, Aland has been a practising artist all his adult life (as well as reading Beckett) and has recently inaugurated an Art Curating position at Central Sydney Area Health Service. He has the usual run of awards etc., 22 solo exhibitions, representation in Australian major public galleries, colleges and universities and has been involved in contributing to the Archives of The Samuel Beckett International Foundation, Reading University Library since 1989, the year of Beckett's death, through the guidance of then Professor James Knowlson. Commissions of note include; research illustrator for "Out of the Darkness", a creative approach to history for school children and artist in residence for the Kinetic Energy Theatre Company's 25th. Anniversary, with studies from their repetoire of 8 original and innovative plays.

A Space for Samuel Beckett

After vowing on first sighting the St Peters Brickworks in 1967, moving from Brisbane to Melbourne, that they must eventually become part of my painting vocabulary, now I have lived in their shadow for many years, interpreting community response to their changing roles. (1) As the eventual exhibition developed, so did allusions to elements in the work of Samuel Beckett. People appeared who could have been cast for his writing - Molloy, Malone, studies from "Endgame" and "Waiting for Godot", the dark lady of "ill seen ill said" and visions of the Unnamable. (2) The now smokeless stacks and kilns of the brickworks, have assumed a temple-like religious benevolence long after their original function has ceased, that of being responsible for building most of Sydney's CBD; plus shades of old Testament furnace fire, compass to the heavens, evidence of child labour, the Cross and the Holocaust - Art as Catharsis - image transforms into vision. (3) There is a searing joy in recognising dark realities - the heights and depths of art, through life, which can slice the soul to tears, as in human life lived at one pole and yet experiencing both. (4) Slides of the brickworks and setting, and of appropriate drawings and paintings, will be used to illuminate the above.

DOTS AND COMMAS EVEN IN THE SILENCE

Having put myself to the task of drawing with and without words in an empty space, I set my mind on working on two different Beckett plays simultaneously: Not I and Act Without Words (I and II). These works would be presented as part of the Homage to Samuel Beckett organized by the University of Buenos Aires after the tenth anniversary of his death in 1999.

The subject of this paper consists in the analysis of two different types of textures of Beckettian writting: The chaotic cumulus of endless words in Not I where Mouth shouts out her anguish through random words in a sort of non-linear system with odd isles of peculiar order, and on the other hand, if we take Act Without Words I and II, the indications of silent actions given by Beckett make a very linear system, clock mechanism like, with the series of mute actions ordered like the punctuation signs over a particular discourse.

I've tried to apply concepts from Chaos Theory such as fractals, iteration, strange attractors and periodic-aperiodic behaviours. I also worked over the paradox of staging a silent text which offers the possibility of being "read" using all the elements belonging to written language (dots, commas, brackets, etcetera) and a very verbal one where the all the time faster gush of "real" words makes it impossible to be "read" or apprehended.

Sergio Amigo &  Luis Gayol

 DIARIES OF HAPPY DAYS IN BUENOS AIRES, 1997-2000

 "It would be much better if you took her out from the mound..." (From a young actor after seeing Happy Days)

During 1997 an Argentinean director and a group of actors founded a theatre company in Buenos Aires, Argentina with the aim of performing Samuel Beckett plays. By the end of that year the company, named precisely "Company" after Beckett's novel, started rehearsing Happy Days, which would be performed in English language for the first time in the country. This was somehow a bit of a shock for an audience that - though possesing a rich cultural life- was not used to classical texts and nevertheless in a foreign language.The experience was supported by the University of Buenos Aires and won the "Theatre of the World Award". From its first performance in January 1998 to the last one in July 2000 at the British Arts Centre in Buenos Aires, the play went through all the circumstances that transformed Argentina from a flourishing environment for theatrical experimentation to its present state of crisis and uncertainty.The present work is an account of those unbelievable, funny and sometimes frustrating years performing Happy Days across the city of Buenos Aires and almost getting to the Falkland Islands!

Azari, Ehsan

PhD student with the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University. My thesis topic is: Jacques Lacan: Desire in Theory and Literature.

Waiting for Missing Other: A Lacanian reading of Beckett

For Lacan the Other is ex-sistence, it has no existence in the Symbolic because it is inarticulable in language in its unmediated form.  This traumatic loss gives rise to the desire of the Other in which Beckett's characters are perpetually entrapped for, as Lacan insists: "the desire of the man is the desire of the Other". This is the Other that exist in the symbolic only as an imaginary absence, but determines the subject, determines his/her desire, and speech.

Lacan formulates the impossibility with the Other in his Schema L and a mathematical operation that leads to the imaginary number i or (-1), representing an object that exists but all doors for its representation are closed. The subject's access to the Other is held back by an imaginary relationship between the ego and object petit a.

Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot offers a topology of this absence of Godot, God(Other) and its traumatic effects on the subject, and no literary work can represent it better than Bekcett's characters.  Vladimir and Estragon are doomed to wait for the Other to come which never happens, simply, because it is missing, and can only be presented by an absence.  They have lost their contact with the Other because it belongs to the field of the Real, a forbidden field in the symbolic. Thus, they are lost and don't know the answer to the primary question of their existence.  This seems to them as rather superimposed by an unknown powerful source. They suffers because the relive the traumatic experience of separation Spaltung, and in order to live they would need the confirmation of their very existence at any moment from this illusory and deceptive Other.

It is this absence; silence, deception, and seduction of the Other that bring up all the chaos to the drama that Beckett is keen to symbolise for the entire universe and the human world.  The two tramps arrive each day at the same place to perform their ritual wait. But they have chosen the wrong place, because they have lost the sense of the location that was once very familiar. The wall of language has blocked their way, as Estragon admits, "We hardly know him: Personally I wouldn't know him if I ever saw him."

This essay argues that Waiting for Godot reveals truths about the process of subject formation: that is, that an effect of the signifier will cut the subject off eternally from his/her own knowledge. As such, the subject will always live in a state of crisis with his own self-identification.  And Beckett is the master of deploying

Barfield, Steven

 United Kingdom

 On The Difficulty of ‘Loving’ Beckett’s Drama

 In this paper I wanted to ask what seems at first sight a rather odd, indeed eccentric question: why is it that people ‘love’ Beckett’s work and his drama in particular?

And love is the right word. People generally either love Beckett or remain indifferent — there seems to be no middle ground. Like love it is a relationship between Beckett and theatregoers that borders on many of the qualities we associate with that term, often obsessional and sometimes mysterious. In addition, the relationship itself seems to be emotional first, before it is intellectual (although later as critics we find ways of explaining it to ourselves and others in terms of contexts, themes and issues and of course form and language).

In this paper I want to use psychoanalytic theories about love and especially the notion of ‘recognition’ to explore why this is looking at some revealing moments in critical commentary and to argue that Beckett’s dramatic works foreground and model similar processes of this process of ‘recognition’ within themselves. I will be examining Waiting For Godot, Endgame and some of the later plays. I will also be considering the outrage that certain of the recent Beckett on Film plays generated in terms of questions of fidelity to the text in the light of the affective response to Beckett’s work.

 Barker, Stephen

Professor, University of California at Irvine

Acted, directed, danced, choreographed, and taught professionally in New York, London, and throughout Great Britain and Europe, including the Edinburgh, Dublin, Rotterdam, Amsterdam Festivals, and then worldwide. Taught at Studio '68 of Theatre Arts, London. Danced with and choreographed worldwide for, and taught at, the London Contemporary Dance Theatre and School (the Martha Graham Company of London). Performed throughout Europe with with Moving Being, Geoff Moore's multi-media company, based in Cardiff, Wales. Has published widely on literary and aesthetic theory, chiefly on Beckett, Nietzsche, Freud, Derrida, Jarry, Faulkner, Arthur Miller, and others.

 A la recherche du temps beckettien

In both senses implicit in the use of the word in the title of the seminar, "after" is vital in Beckett’s work. Perpetually caught between scene and narration, time and no-time, myth and the "real," in both his fiction and drama, Beckett inquires into the nature of the "after." Indeed, the agonizing play between any possibility of the passage of time ("let’s go"; "they don’t move") and the "real time" of theatrical or narrative "events" (actors speaking words, readers following the obligatory linearity of narrative textuality) produces an incomparable vertigo in those texts and performances. The viewer/reader is constantly both spotlighted and cancelled; the actor or narrative voice is consistently both present in/for the text and utterly impossible.

This effect of heightening and cancelling or suspending time, what I here call Beckett’s subliminal time, is clearly in evidence in Murphy and other works of the late 1930’s, only to become the very core of his work through the diaspora years in Roussillon and then in subsequent investigations of the subliminal effect of this doubling in his later work for a variety of media (chosen with the subliminal time effect in mind, I suggest).

And, of course, the idea of both telescoping and micro-managing time has become a fundamental building block of all postmodern literature and drama–just as it was a central tenet of the more innovative late modernist aesthetic from which Beckett emerged (e.g. Stein, Joyce). In this sense, "after" Beckett must be read as, for example, "a Provençal landscape after van Gogh" or " provincial French aristocratic scene after Poussin"; i.e. a question not of temporality but of genealogy. This sense of the "after" is, at first glance, also temporal, but as I will show (with the proper debt to Eliot), it is impossible to look at Vermeer, or Giotto, or Lascaux, or to experience Ibsen, or Marlowe, or Euripides in the same way "after" experiencing this subliminal time in Beckett. Deconstruction in action!

In my presentation I will explore this double helix, offering examples from Beckett’s textual, visual and theatrical art as illustrations. The paper’s theoretical framework comes through direct and indirect references to Beckett in Blau, Hassan, Derrida, and Blanchot.

Beckett,  Jennifer R.M.

 M.Phil Candidate — Department of English, University of Sydney

Beckett on Film

When one thinks of the great Irish writers and playwrights who have had their work adapted to film one does not generally think of Beckett. Yet Beckett has some 38 screen credits to his name as scriptwriter (including one original screenplay Film) and director according the International Movie Database (IMDB). This number has risen again since Michael Colgan and Alan Moloney bought their award-winning Beckett on Film project to screens during 2000/1. The project attracted an amazing calibre of talent including Academy Award winners Neil Jordan (dir. Not I) and Anthony Minghella (dir. Play) and the late Sir John Gielgud (act. Catastrophe). That the project could attract such talent and acclaim from audiences and critics alike is an indication of the continuing fascination with Beckett’s work.

The aim of this paper is to explore the way in which Beckett’s work has been translated to film paying particular attention to the aforementioned Beckett on Film project. It will look not only at the way in which others have interpreted his work but also how Beckett translated his own work to the screen. The paper will also delve into Beckett’s fascination with the process, theatrics and artistic possibilities presented by the film making process with particular attention being paid to his original film Film.

Ben-Zvi, Linda

Linda Ben-Zvi, Professor emerita in English and Theatre, Colorado State University, is now Senior Professor of Theatre at Tel Aviv University, Israel. She specializes in American drama, modern and contemporary British and European drama, and feminist drama and theatre. She was named Distinguished Professor at Colorado, was a Senior Fellow at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Newberry Library, Chicago; and was named Lady Davis Professor at Hebrew University. She was the first woman president of the International Samuel Beckett Society, and is presently the convenor and Chair of the Beckett Working group, which meets every two years under the auspices of the International Federation of Theatre Research. She is Editor of Assaph: Studies in the Theatre, the Tel Aviv University English language theatre journal, and is on the Editorial boards of the Harold Pinter Review, Modern Drama, and Essays in Theatre. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary drama, particularly on the works of Beckett, Pinter, O¹Neill, and Glaspell. Her books include Samuel Beckett, Women in Beckett, Susan Glaspell, Theatre in Israel, and Writings from the Verge: The Life and Times of Susan Glaspell. She is presently co-editing the Complete Plays of Susan Glaspell; and editing The Road to the Temple, Glaspell¹s biography of George Cram Cook; and A Casebook on Glaspell¹s Trifles.

Bignell, Jonathan (panel with Dr Daniela Caselli and Dr Stephen Thomson

Dr Jonathan Bignell is Reader in Television and Film at the University of Reading. He is the author of Postmodern Media Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 'Writing the Child in Media Theory' (Yearbook of English Studies, 2002), 'Beckett in Television Studies' (Journal of Beckett Studies, 2001), and Beckett on Screen: The Television Plays (Manchester UP, 2003).

Beckett¹s Children

The notion of the child in literature and culture has recently received a lot of critical attention. Among the most thought-provoking new approaches to the idea of the child in literature and culture are the works of Jacqueline Rose (The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children¹s Fiction, 1984), Valerie Walkerdine (Schoolgirl Fictions, 1991; Daddy¹s Girl. Young Girls and Popular Culture, 1997), and Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (Children¹s Literature. Criticism and the Fictional Child, 1994; Children in Culture. Approaches to Childhood, 1998; special issue of The Yearbook of English Studies on ŒChildren in Literature¹, 2002).

As Rose and Lesnik-Oberstein have extensively argued, the child works as a self-explanatory presence and as a knowable entity precisely when a multitude of contrasting meanings are assigned to it. Such meanings are historically and culturally shaped, and cover a number of contradictory positions; the child is claimed to be absolute innocence and visionary knowledge, free sexuality and lack of sexuality, true originality and pure imitation. Our readings will critique how the child is constructed as what can be accessed in unmediated forms and will demonstrate the contradictions involved in the multiple uses of childhood in discourse.

Jacqueline Rose has critiqued how the conception of "both the child and the world as knowable in a direct and unmediated way" places "the innocence of the child and a primary state of language and/or culture in a close and mutually dependent relation." (9) Following this relationship between child and language, we will analyse how the works of Samuel Beckett, which relentlessly evoke, question and resist the idea of language as a transparent medium, able to access the world, construct the child. So far there have been no critical readings of the different functions that the child has in Beckett. And yet, Beckett¹s ¦uvre, generally discussed as populated with geriatric characters, is surprisingly prolific in children.

Waiting for Godot famously ends with the exit of the boy from whom Vladimir has tried to extract the promise of having been seen; similarly, a boy appears at the end of Ghost Trio, shaking his head, sphinx-like, three times, before turning and going. In All That Fall too, the "little child" concludes the narrative, raising questions in relation not only to the ways in which all these children play with ideas of innocence and superior knowledge, but also to the function of their privileged structural position within the narrative.

In Endgame Hamm¹s story cruelly elaborates on the pathetic potential of the dying child and "a small boy" on the horizon, while Not I also evokes and questions the pathetic role of the "tiny little girl", at once playing with and questioning sentimentality. In the prose works a number of children fade in and out of the narrative, from the "little creature to hold in my arms" which Malone dreams, and eventually eats, to those "strange words for a little girl, or a little boy" which sing the narrator to sleep in "The End", to the "small boy" protagonist of Company. Children in their role of offspring mediate ideas of origin, geneology, and memory in a variety of texts, from Watt to A Piece of Monologue to The Old Tune, from "Whoroscope"¹s "my only child", to the "good boy" of "Sanies I", from "one so little" in "thither" to the "enfant tres prodigue" of "Ascension".

***

The panel is constituted of three scholars, who will analyse how the notion of the child operates in the different genres in which the Beckett ¦uvre is articulated. Jonathan Bignell will analyse Ghost Trio and the TV plays not only to discuss how childhood is represented in the TV plays, but also to explore Beckett's use of TV as a 'paedocratising' or 'pedagogical' medium. Beckett's plays will be discussed as a location for theoretical reflections on TV as a medium. Daniela Caselli will look at the different functions that the child has in some of the prose works, especially in Company, and will link it to the ways in which the Beckett ¦uvre evokes and critiques ideas of genealogy and memory through the notion of the child. She will map out how a corpus of texts which engages relentlessly with repetition, possession, and authority, produces children in order to critique the possibility of spontaneity, transparency, and transmission. Stephen Thomson will analyse the plays, especially Waiting for Godot and Endgame, looking at how the salvation is mediated by the figure of the child and how this is linked to the structure of the promise in Beckett. Notions of sentimentality will also be discussed in relation to Eve Kosofski Sedgwick¹s theories.

The aim of the panel is on the one hand to explore a previously unread aspect of the Beckett ¦uvre, and on the other to challenge the ways in which the child is usually not read and interpreted precisely because it works as spontaneity, transparency, and "matter". To look at the child in Beckett will mean to reconfigure the Beckett ¦uvre, looking at those specific places in the texts where ideas of pathos, spontaneity, and innocence are discussed. It will also mean looking at Beckett as a case study able to reconfigure the critical debate on the child in literature and media and to rethink about wider theoretical aspects of representation, communication and discourse in both fields.

***

The panel will be constituted by Dr Jonathan Bignell, Dr Daniela Caselli, and Dr Stephen Thomson. The panel will conjugate an expertise in Beckett studies with specific interests in the construction of childhood in media, modernist literature, and comparative literature.

Binju, Dr. Miniti

Country, India. Phd. English - Samuel Beckett: The concept of reality

BECKETT AFTER: Beckett in India

Culture, social, conditioning and educational background of the audience determine its response to the plays of Beckett In fact, Beckett has made some impact on Indo-English drama because he has become a part of academic syllabus. Waiting for Godot has been prescribed for the Honours and post-graduate classes. Students of these colleges have attempted to stage Waiting for Godot but other plays are ignored altogether.

National theatre experimental groups have staged most of the plays in the metros. Most of them have been fidel to the text but some have dared to innovate within the thematic framework.

Godot has remained an enigma to the Indian audience. They refuse to accept him hedged in with human dimensions. Indians, particularly Hindus, who are steeped in mythologies and are not at ease with different gods, regard Godot something more than human. Eva Metman is more in tune with Indian sensibility, when she says that Godot seems to be a kind of hope to mankind.

When in the second act, Vladimir and Estragon talk of God, Pozzo appears and is mistaken by Estragon to Godot. Here Indians have made an innovation. Before the appearance of Pozzo on the stage, there is a flash of divine presence. No shape, no words, only the flash of light. Then Pozzo appears to heighten the mounting tension between the flash of light and the unwelcome presence of Pozzo. The Indian director has introduced this innovation to underline the fact that good and evil exist side by side and there will be the ultimate triumph of good over evil.

Endgame too comes in for a minor change. Clov is struggling to venture out in the outer world. Then, there is a surprise.

Clov : (dismayed). Looks like a small boy!

Hamm : (sarcastic) A small boy.

A small boy is a religious or a quasi- religious symbolism: Moses, Christ or even Buddha contemplating the navel. Indian dramatists have made a change. The small boy appears in the form of Lord Krishna - the god of redemption and hope. Indian dramatists attempt to escape contemporary reality and valves and hesitate to confront the concept of emptiness and nothingness which Beckett often quotes:

Nothing is more real than nothing

Indian dramatists believe in hope, however, dreary and hopeless the contemporary landscape may be

 Birdi, Alvin

 School of English and American Studies, University of Sussex

 Imperceptibility and the politics of style in Coetzee and Beckett

 This paper compares the fiction of Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee in the context of the work of Deleuze and Guattari and offers a reading of the textual politics of these authors. It concentrates on the Deleuzoguatarrian notions of imperceptibility and style and supplements work by authors who, in the wake of the recent resurgence of interest in Levinas, have reconsidered poststructuralist writings in view of their ethical concerns. These readings pursue their ethical claims by positing a residual vestige of humanism that coexists, however uneasily, with postfoundationalism. In contrast to these readings, this paper argues that through a number of stylistic operations, Beckett and Coetzee are able to effect a textual politics which gains its ethical force through a dislocation from any subject or residual humanist viewpoint. As a corollary, it claims that the lines of communication between Coetzee and Beckett are as much at the level of form and style as they are at the level of content.

Herbert Blau is the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington. He was co-founder and co-director of The Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco (1952-65), and later co-director of the Repertory Theater of the Lincoln Center in New York (1965-68). His last extended work in the theatre was as the artistic director of the experimental group KRAKEN (1968-81), the groundwork for which was prepared in the early seventies at California Institute of the Arts.

He has published numerous influential books on performance theory. Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (1982) develops a theory of theater from his work with KRAKEN, and Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theater (1982) amplifies the theory. These two books received the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, and he has also received The Kenyon Review award for Literary Excellence. The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern (1987) explores the incursion of theatricality in and beyond the arts, in other forms of experience. The Audience (1990) is a further extension of what has become a sort of ontology of performance, while To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance (1992) asks – in a period with an ethos of suspicion – what is the future of illusion? Blau’s most recent books are Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett (2000) and Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion (1999). A collection of essays spanning a quarter of a century, The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976-2000 has just been published.

This lecture will be looking, after Beckett, at certain tendencies in the other arts--for which aspects of his work were prototypes--particularly body art & installations, & maybe, too, in popular culture, though in & out of the arts, mainly what's Beckettian now as a virtual habit of mind. Throughout the lecture the focus will be on a sort of dialogue of inconsequence with metaphysical intimations, non sequiturs with accretions of value, & the struggle to which there's no point, except the always teasing imminence of the fastidious declension of meaning toward what you'd rather not, or, what he shared with Proust, the confused remembrance of truths that, if never known, seem somehow to>return like/as the future of illusion. And, to be utterly sure, there's no cure for that.

 Bowne-Anderson, Hugo

First year Science/Arts student, University of Sydney, member of Sydney University Dramatic Society.

 Reflections of a Beckett Virgin

As I had never directed anything before, many people thought my attempt to direct Beckett's Endgame to be quite ambitious. I had no idea what I was in for. Endgame, like a great deal of Beckett's theatre, is almost trivial when read on the page. One can only begin to absorb and endure the theatre as intended when it is exactly that, theatre. This is something I kept in the front of my mind while directing Endgame. I will discuss the difficulties both the actors and myself were presented with by the text during both the rehearsal period and the two-week run. These range from the problems induced by attempting to explore the contrasts between the exhaustive (in terms of both the audience and what the play tends to do with both character and concept) nature of the text and the more comedic elements which I felt needed to be brought out to the ways in which the actors reacted to having to bring Endgame to life. It was an arduous process for the vision I had was something I had lived with since I first read the play and trying to bring it to life (if one can call it that) so that it might be watchable for a student audience was an experience which really tested everybody involved.

 Boxall, Peter

English Subject Group, School of English and American Studies, University of Sussex

 'The way we think and see': Beckett and DeLillo

 This paper looks at the relationship between Beckett and DeLillo, and asks how far Beckett's writing can be thought of as producing the conditions that have given rise to DeLillo's oeuvre. DeLillo, as an (apparently) epic American, postmodernist writer, can be regarded as moving beyond the constricted boundaries of Beckett's starved landscapes, which then become the far markers of late modernism. But this paper will suggest that the conditions of possibility of DeLillo's writing are born, to some extent, out of the still stirrings of Beckett's late prose. Bill Gray, the fictional writer in DeLillo's novel Mao II, suggests that Beckett is the 'last writer to shape the way we think and see'. This paper will look at examples of Beckett's late short prose, and ask how far his writing can be thought of as producing a perspective on the world, or shaping a response to it. It will then go on to read DeLillo's latest novel, The Body Artist, against Beckett's short prose, to work out the extent to which DeLillo's writing is working within the terms that are set by Beckett's aesthetic practice.

 Broun, Alex

 Born in Sydney I have been lucky enough to enjoy considerable success in theatre, TV and film as a writer, actor and director. I have had plays performed in South Africa, England and Australia.

Among my performed plays are Pick Ups, Desire, Scenes From An Affair, Just Once and Potential for Violence. Pick Ups was nominated for the Vita Award for Best New Play in South Africa in 1999 and Just Once won the Sydney Theatre Company’s Young Playwright Scheme in 1986.

As an actor I have appeared in Neighbours, Home and Away and The Cowra Breakout on TV and the films The Place at the Coast, Watch the Shadows Dance and Breaking Loose.

I have also worked extensively as a journalist/broadcaster in rugby union and in 2001 served as Media Liaison for the British and Irish Lions on their tour of Australia and acted as Media Liaison for the Springbok rugby team from 1996 to 2000.

I also have a play in the Sydney Festival myself, Blind City, which will be presented as part of Two Up at The Darlinghurst Theatre.

 Beckett and Cricket

 Beckett had a great love of cricket during his life. Playing avidly in his school days and following the game with a passion for most of his days.

Indeed there are several veiled references to the game in his work especially the novels and poems.

During his many years in Paris he was often known to enquire of the cricket scores in letters back to the UK and Ireland and would seek out places where he could listen to Test matches on the radio.

Actually his one regret when he first moved to Paris was that he would "miss the cricket".

The paper draws on references from his biographers, letters from his old school team, interpretations of his work and presents photographic images linking Beckett to the game -where he played, score sheets, his team etc.

What was it about cricket that Beckett so responded to ? Rather than another sport - soccer or rugby ? Did he enjoy the minimal nature of the game ? Or was it that it could be broken down into independent units - ball, space, ball ?

Beckett and the Dynamic Still

In Beckett's writing, movement patterns are often jerky, irresolute, subject to delays and dilemmas. Whatever the complexities of these looping movements, Beckett's work is seen to be inhabited by what Deleuze and Guattari call a 'transpositional subject', which is always on the move between actual or imagined positions. Hence, the narrator of TEXTS FOR NOTHING says: 'I could not stay there and I could not continue'. In his later work - both prose and drama - no Beckett character is exempted from a difficult relationship with his or her body in space. If able to move, he or she paces restlessly in predetermined patterns. If, as is more common, mobility does not come so easily, or is imposed, he or she is condemned to ceaseless aspiration towards stasis or towards alternative movement configurations. Insofar as these impulses seem to cohabit rather than to alternate in Beckett's spaces, they invite linkages with some aspects of painting and the visual arts. This paper explores the nomadic and the statuesque, the still and the dynamic in Beckett's work, with reference to chosen examples from twentieth-century visual art.

Byron, Mark

 MARK BYRON completed his PhD, entitled Exilic Modernism and Textual Ontogeny: Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos and Samuel Beckett's Watt, at St John's College, Cambridge in 2001. He is currently Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Sydney, and is publishing on modernist textual practice and its implications for editing, and also on the relations between the arts in modernism.

 The Ecstasy of Writing Watt

Although begun early in 1941, and substantially drafted by 1945,Beckett's last long novel in English was not published until 1953. That is, it did not see the light of day until after the première of Waiting for Godot in Paris and after each of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable had been published by Editions de Minuit. The story of the composition and transmission into print is one of perseverance, frustration, and resignation. Indeed, all extant printings of the novel are replete with inconsistencies and discordances, and partially conceal an imbricated relationship with the novel‚s archive. Yet the complex textual history of _Watt_ can provide a way to reconfigure ideas concerning Beckett‚s aesthetic development and the unfolding of his oeuvre. The composition and transmission of Watt was an ecstatic process (ecstasis means, literally, to stand beside oneself)? it proceeded alongside the emergence of other significant work and can be seen to complicate notions of literary influence, genealogy, and the literary object. Given that Watt presents some unique problems of physical and conceptual integrity for editorial method, it may provide an opportunity to review the status of the literary work at the time Beckett was producing his famous challenges to the novel and to dramatic form.

Caselli, Daniela (panel with Dr Jonathan Bignell and Dr Stephen Thomson

Dr Daniela Caselli is Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has co-edited with Laura Salisbury and Steven Connor a special issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies, 10:1 and 2 (Fall 2000/Spring 2001; reprinted as Other Becketts, Tallahasse (Florida): Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2002). She is the author of a number of articles on Beckett, among which ŒShadows of Belacqua in Dream of Fair to Middling Women and How It Is¹ (Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd¹hui, 2001), ŒGod that old favourite: Issues of Authority in Beckett¹s How It Is¹ (Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd¹hui, 2001), and Œ"Looking It Up in My Big Dante": A Note on ŒSedendo and Quiescendo¹ (Journal of Beckett Studies, 1997). From February 2003 she will be a Lecturer in English at the University of Salford (Manchester, UK).

Beckett¹s Children

The notion of the child in literature and culture has recently received a lot of critical attention. Among the most thought-provoking new approaches to the idea of the child in literature and culture are the works of Jacqueline Rose (The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children¹s Fiction, 1984), Valerie Walkerdine (Schoolgirl Fictions, 1991; Daddy¹s Girl. Young Girls and Popular Culture, 1997), and Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (Children¹s Literature. Criticism and the Fictional Child, 1994; Children in Culture. Approaches to Childhood, 1998; special issue of The Yearbook of English Studies on ŒChildren in Literature¹, 2002).

As Rose and Lesnik-Oberstein have extensively argued, the child works as a self-explanatory presence and as a knowable entity precisely when a multitude of contrasting meanings are assigned to it. Such meanings are historically and culturally shaped, and cover a number of contradictory positions; the child is claimed to be absolute innocence and visionary knowledge, free sexuality and lack of sexuality, true originality and pure imitation. Our readings will critique how the child is constructed as what can be accessed in unmediated forms and will demonstrate the contradictions involved in the multiple uses of childhood in discourse.

Jacqueline Rose has critiqued how the conception of "both the child and the world as knowable in a direct and unmediated way" places "the innocence of the child and a primary state of language and/or culture in a close and mutually dependent relation." (9) Following this relationship between child and language, we will analyse how the works of Samuel Beckett, which relentlessly evoke, question and resist the idea of language as a transparent medium, able to access the world, construct the child. So far there have been no critical readings of the different functions that the child has in Beckett. And yet, Beckett¹s ¦uvre, generally discussed as populated with geriatric characters, is surprisingly prolific in children.

Waiting for Godot famously ends with the exit of the boy from whom Vladimir has tried to extract the promise of having been seen; similarly, a boy appears at the end of Ghost Trio, shaking his head, sphinx-like, three times, before turning and going. In All That Fall too, the "little child" concludes the narrative, raising questions in relation not only to the ways in which all these children play with ideas of innocence and superior knowledge, but also to the function of their privileged structural position within the narrative.

In Endgame Hamm¹s story cruelly elaborates on the pathetic potential of the dying child and "a small boy" on the horizon, while Not I also evokes and questions the pathetic role of the "tiny little girl", at once playing with and questioning sentimentality. In the prose works a number of children fade in and out of the narrative, from the "little creature to hold in my arms" which Malone dreams, and eventually eats, to those "strange words for a little girl, or a little boy" which sing the narrator to sleep in "The End", to the "small boy" protagonist of Company. Children in their role of offspring mediate ideas of origin, geneology, and memory in a variety of texts, from Watt to A Piece of Monologue to The Old Tune, from "Whoroscope"¹s "my only child", to the "good boy" of "Sanies I", from "one so little" in "thither" to the "enfant tres prodigue" of "Ascension".

***

The panel is constituted of three scholars, who will analyse how the notion of the child operates in the different genres in which the Beckett ¦uvre is articulated. Jonathan Bignell will analyse Ghost Trio and the TV plays not only to discuss how childhood is represented in the TV plays, but also to explore Beckett's use of TV as a 'paedocratising' or 'pedagogical' medium. Beckett's plays will be discussed as a location for theoretical reflections on TV as a medium. Daniela Caselli will look at the different functions that the child has in some of the prose works, especially in Company, and will link it to the ways in which the Beckett ¦uvre evokes and critiques ideas of genealogy and memory through the notion of the child. She will map out how a corpus of texts which engages relentlessly with repetition, possession, and authority, produces children in order to critique the possibility of spontaneity, transparency, and transmission. Stephen Thomson will analyse the plays, especially Waiting for Godot and Endgame, looking at how the salvation is mediated by the figure of the child and how this is linked to the structure of the promise in Beckett. Notions of sentimentality will also be discussed in relation to Eve Kosofski Sedgwick¹s theories.

The aim of the panel is on the one hand to explore a previously unread aspect of the Beckett ¦uvre, and on the other to challenge the ways in which the child is usually not read and interpreted precisely because it works as spontaneity, transparency, and "matter". To look at the child in Beckett will mean to reconfigure the Beckett ¦uvre, looking at those specific places in the texts where ideas of pathos, spontaneity, and innocence are discussed. It will also mean looking at Beckett as a case study able to reconfigure the critical debate on the child in literature and media and to rethink about wider theoretical aspects of representation, communication and discourse in both fields.

***

The panel will be constituted by Dr Jonathan Bignell, Dr Daniela Caselli, and Dr Stephen Thomson. The panel will conjugate an expertise in Beckett studies with specific interests in the construction of childhood in media, modernist literature, and comparative literature.

Winnie's is a body which always refers to its own absence and ultimately one which fails to signify the sum of its parts; a body textualizing the mourning of an unspecified loss. With reference to some of the claims by Edward Said in his text Reflections on Exile, this paper will address such issues as:

• Identity and displacement as these relate specifically to the experience of exile; a recurring theme in Beckett's life and work.

And will raise such questions as:

• If 'To speak in the old style' is no longer appropriate as a means of expression, what then is available to Winnie at the level of rhetoric? Can she as a sole speaker formulate a 'new style'?
• Do Winnie's attempts to access the registers of literary and historical texts result in a conflation into the observer and observed subject, and is it this collapse which characterises the play's dynamic? Does she have the material and/or the authorial context with which to formulate a 'new style' or must all utterances be mediated through essentially redundant frames of reference?

• Is language and its products an outmoded currency of engagement; if so does Winnie's sourcing of it inevitably result only in littering the textual landscape with its redundant by-products?

 Colleran, Jeanne

 Department of English John Carroll University Cleveland, Ohio

 History, Memory and Trauma in the Theatre of Samuel Beckett and Susan Lori Parks

Had the characters been named "Mourner" and "Medium" instead of "Brazil" and "Lucy," one might guess the author to be the Irish writer Samuel Beckett rather than the young African American playwright, Susan Lori Parks. Add to these characters who might have appeared in Rockabye or Footfalls, the "lesser man" who is lost in a grave pit of ash and gravel where bits of his past, like Winnie’s things, jut from the debris and a wide map of two roads criss-crosses the stage, and all manner of connection to Beckett’s theatrical world is invoked. These visual signs are further complemented by the aural: loud booms and sudden shots ring out like the piercing bell in Happy Days. And there are the pauses, too, as well as the linguistic flourishes, puns, literary and historical allusions, and there is the dramatic action that is built around waiting interminably and searching unsuccessfully, even as time and hope diminish.

I would like in my presentation to trace these and other Beckettian influences on the work of Susan Lori Parks, particularly in her Lincoln plays, "The American Play," and "Topdog/Underdog," the latter the 2002 Pulitizer Prize winner. In addition to the many surface resemblances, I would like to explore how Beckett’s presentation of the dynamics of manipulation and the effects of trauma are central to Parks’ meditations on life for African Americans at the end of the twentieth century. Specifically, I would like to examine how The America Play parallels the search for the origins of suffering and culpability that is evident in so many of Beckett’s dramatic works and how the blood brothers of Topdog/Underdog re-enact the bonds and struggles of Didi and Gogo against a backdrop of commercial exploitation and racism that is as cruel as Beckett’s existential emptiness.

In his study of Proust, Beckett writes, "We are rather in the position of Tantalus, with this difference, that we allow ourselves to be tantalized" (3). In Parks’ dramatic world, the characters are indeed tantalized: in The America Play, it is the myth of Lincoln the liberator, the Founding Father of Emancipation, the Great Man, that inspires the lesser black man, the "faux-father/foe-father." By try as he might to imitate Lincoln in mind and body, it is only when he agrees to put his likeness up for sale by allowing any and all to re-enact Lincoln’s assassination and shoot him, can the lesser man make a living. In "Topdog/Underdog" Parks continues her exploration of the commodification of American ideals. Here, again, the only "legitimate" living a black man can make is through agreeing to indignation and exploitation.

Beckett's Atmospherics

Following and extending the work of Bachelard and Serres, my aim is to further the understanding of Beckett's material imagination. In this lecture, I will consider the imagination of air in Beckett, in a number of different states and senses: as breath, as odour, as lightness, as volatility, vapour and void.

Conti, Dr Chris

 The Importance of Beckett to Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory

The work of Samuel Beckett plays an exemplary role in Theodor Adorno’s theory of the autonomous artwork. By the autonomy of the artwork Adorno meant its ability to bear a series of antinomies–the artwork’s autonomy from society and its origins in society; its mimetic and anti-mimetic nature, etc–that have bedevilled philosophy and aesthetics since Kant. Adorno understood Beckett’s theatre in the light of his attempt to restructure dialectics at a time when faith in an oppositional politics or revolutionary subject had evaporated. Adorno’s rethinking of the relation between theory and practice in Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory continually looked to Beckett as a model of non-instrumental or aesthetic rationality, and the extent to which Beckett’s work, particularly Godot and Endgame, can be said to have influenced Adorno’s theories of the artwork will be briefly discussed. For Adorno, the authentic artwork gathers its social critique into its form as the only way to guard against the reappropriation of its content by the culture industry. I will explain the difficulty of interpreting Godot and Endgame as integral to the opposition to the reification of contemporary society implied in both plays.

Cordingley, Anthony

PhD candidate, University of Sydney, Australia

Literary Affiliation and Disaffiliation: The Prose of Beckett and Borges

The contemporaneous late prose of Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges developed avant-garde modes distinctive in their respective English/French and Latin American/Spanish literary traditions. While having very different prose styles, both authors worked with a common desire to affiliate their work outside of the literary traditions of their native tongue.

Amongst other things, Beckett's oeuvre presents a negotiation between the English and French languages, between his own sense of his subject consciousness as a writer in English, and as a writer in French. Famously, a writer in self-exile in France, and of the self-in-exile, Beckett's disavowal of English for French mid career and his return to it late in his career, can be read as the effect of a profound distrust for language itself. In Comment c'est/How It Is and Beckett's late trilogy, Compagnie/Company, Mal vu mal dit/ Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho, the author is seemingly obsessed with the semantic aberrance of words. He grapples with them inside his narrative stricture, finally attempting to isolate them as the correspondence of his imperative voice. The project fails, but it belies the dynamic between the author and the journeys of his words, yet it also exposes him as one who desires his own defeat, his fated escape into language.

By the 1960's Jorge Luis Borges had developed a prose style unique in the Hispanic world, and one locally maligned as "intellectual", or "European"― though a survey of Borges' writing at this time reveals his obsession with English literature, with Shakespeare, Browning, Stevenson and Chesterton for example. In Borges, who learnt to read English before Spanish, we can detect the imitation of English writers, a strategy that reveals his own desire to affiliate his work with the Anglophone literary tradition.

Crane, Assoc. Professor Ralph

 Ralph Crane is Associate Professor and Chairperson of English at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. He has published extensively in the areas of Indian and Anglo-Indian fiction and on the works of J.G. Farrell. Is books include Troubled Pleasures: The Fiction of J.G. Farrell (with Jennifer Livett) and J.G. Farrell: The Critical Grip (ed.).

 After Beckett: The Influence of Samuel Beckett on the Fiction of J.G. Farrell

Many reviewers of J.G. Farrell's early fiction noted both general and specific echoes of Beckett in his work. One reviewer, for example, comments on the central character of A Girl in the Head (1967) spending 'the time between drink and copulation moaning into a tape recorder after the manner of Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape …', while others make more tentative comparisons. Ronald Binns, in an article on Farrell in the Malcolm Lowry Newsletter, senses, again in A Girl in the Head, ‘a variety of undigested influences–Camus, Beckett, Lowry’ (23).

By way of introduction, I will begin this paper with some general comparisons between Beckett and Farrell–both Irishmen who escaped to France. (And while Farrell may not have remained in that country, he did remain a life-long Francophile.)

My paper will then comprise two main parts. In the first part I will detail some of the specific parallels between the two writers–what might be called Farrell’s deliberate application of Beckett.

In the second part of my paper I will move on to consider the unconscious echoing of Beckett in Farrell’s fiction (the intertextuality that Kristeva and Barthes argue is a condition of the production of all texts).

 Davies, Paul

PAUL DAVIES, Reader in English at the University of Ulster, Ireland, is author of The Ideal Real: Beckett's Fiction and Imagination (1994), and Beckett and Eros (2000). He has contributed to books and journals on Beckett including The Cambridge Companin to Beckett (1994), Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, and Temenos. His work in eco-criticism covers Romantic and Modern topics, including a contribution to The Environmental Tradition in English Literature (2002).

 Samuel Beckett from the perspective of Eco-Criticism : Beckett's Travels and the Sky

 Beckett studies is only just beginning to recognise the relevance of the theory of ecopoetics (study of literature and the environment). I intend to give a paper on Beckett's unique inscription of climate, situating Beckett within the ecopoetics debate.

Throughout his prose and plays he offers relentlessly similar wordings and visual cues referring to the weather. We are repeatedly presented with a day in which the main portion is put totally out of account and an extreme attention directed towards the fact that light properly speaking is only available at dawn and dusk. This is far removed from a normalised construction of daylight and its meanings.

Beckett's way of writing about daylight, while it is an accurate observation, figures the light exclusively as an advent and an exiting, and not as a situation. 'The weather. Sky overcast all day till evening. In the west-north-west near the verge already the sun came out at last. Rain? A few drops if you will. A few drops in the morning if you will.'

Beckett iconizes an unmistakable transcript of a climate phenomenon known widely in Ireland; and what I have written of as the trope of the 'sudden gleam', where the light of outside is spoken of as the light inside: 'Now that I'm entering night I have kinds of gleams in my skull.' The 'gleam' suddenly moves beyond a bioregional signifier and becomes a model for Lighting, enlightenment, the transition between Aufklärung (clarifying enlightenment) and Verklärung (the word used for spiritual transformation and understanding).

Dimock, Wai Chee

Professor, English, Yale University, USA

Weird Copula:Dante and the Lobster

Beginning with the title of Beckett's early story, "Dante and the Lobster," I explore the conjunctive logic put forward by the copula "and." What syntax of thought allows a medieval poet and a crustacean to be jointly adduced in this way? Are they syntactic equivalents? If so, what taxonomy classifies them as such? If not, what then is the grammatical relation between these two?

The puzzle of this conjunction can be further explored by way of an early essay, "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce," the introduction Beckett wrote for *Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress*. The word "and" is conspicuously left out of that title. Why? Why is the copula present where we don't expect it to be, and absent where we do expect it?

From this speculative focus I try to develop a larger argument about Beckett's relation to Dante, whether it warrants the word "and," and what meaning that word would have to take on if it were to be used.

Following some preliminary remarks setting the scene of present discussion of Beckett I move to the argument proper: the three-fold relationship between Beckett's writing and the philosophizing of Heidegger and Derrida.

The aim is twofold: (1) to reassesss my own starting point, a series of articles written in the early 70s (then turned into The existential and its Exits book), on Beckett, Sartre and Heidegger, articles which I had the hubris of sending to Beckett and which prompted replies and, in due course, a meeting in Paris. (2) to include in the discussion the voice of Derrida, unavailable to me thirty years ago, and in so going to move the argument on to a reassessment of something we can put in perspective, the Derridan reading of Heidegger and its relevance for Beckett criticism. This while focussing on two later Heidegger texts on the phenomenon of technology - texts whose concerns lead to Derrida and to larger issues of postmodernity (another phenomenon now able to be viewed historically). I want to reassess the various and celebrated demises of the subject and of art in the dual context of Beckett and Heidegger and with Derrida in the background of my considerations.

Dowd, Garin

Country: UK

"BLIND WORD, MUTE VISION": THE ANTI-PHENOMENOLOGY OF BECKETT’S WORSTWARD HO

"The calm sea disembowelled in waterslides

And the cataracting of the doomed horizons"

(Rimbaud, ‘Le Bateau Ivre’ as translated by Beckett)

The question of the relation between the seen and the said is a central one for the tradition of philosophical reflection known as phenomenology. For the generation to which Deleuze belonged the question of one’s relation to that tradition has been both unavoidable and divisive. It is undeniable that phenomenology has its advocates amongst Beckett’s interpreters. Yet, as I shall argue in this paper, Beckett’s work is thoroughly resistant to phenomenological recuperation.

It was Maurice Blanchot who wrote "seeing is not saying", and it would be Foucault who, in the view of Deleuze, most rigorously followed through on the insight contained in this statement of radical non-equivalence. In his book-length study of Foucault Deleuze places special emphasis on the critique of phenomenology which the work represents. In the course of this paper there will be a consideration of Deleuze’s Foucault in the light of the impasse at which the phenomenological tradition arrives in the shape first of Heidegger and then of Merleau-Ponty. Worstward Ho, it will be argued, amounts, via a thoroughgoing problematisation of any putative consonance between the seen and the said, to a rigorously resitant artefact when it comes to the question of a phenomenological or hermeneutic recuperation.

Draine, Betsy

 Professor of English Literature,University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

 Gogo in Glasgow: Beckett and How Late It Was, How Late

James Kelman‚s How Late It Was, How Late won the 1994 Booker Prize amid accusations of vulgarity and inanity, and the nasty labels stuck. Though his immediate defenders coupled his name with Beckett‚s, Kelman has retained a bad-boy image that has hindered consideration of how his novel pays homage to Beckett‚s Waiting for Godot and belongs in its company. Kelman‚s beaten and blinded Sammy can be considered as a Glaswegian Gogo. In Beckett‚s play, the crisis of human meaning is dramatized externally on the stage through the interactions of five characters. In Kelman‚s novel, a similar crisisˆas to what human suffering means and what a man is to make of itˆis dramatized in the mind and voice of one character, who plays all parts, to himself and often against himself. Sammy‚s mind is a darkened stage from which voices of the self cry out, whisper, question, answer, accuse, excuse, tease, banter, and declameˆnot to mention curse.

This paper will trace Beckett‚s legacy in one of the most important novels of the last decade, focusing on the dramatic techniques, poetic devices, and philosophic concerns that Kelman‚s novel shares with Waiting for Godot. At the same time, the paper will show the twist that Kelman turns on Beckett‚s plot. Sammy starts out at Didi‚s point of stasis, but Kelman extends Beckett‚s play into a third act, in which Didi lets Gogo tell his dreams, the images break the hold of habitual thoughts, and a man can move at last.  

Parallel texts in performance: directing Godot in English and French

An obviously rare feature of Beckett's plays is that the English and French versions are authentically his. The translation stage has been a part of his creative process. This has implications for a director equally at home transferring both texts to the performance epiphenomenon.

My productions of the English and French Godots were separated not only by language but by many years (1976 and 2001) and many miles (Auckland and Melbourne). Nevertheless, there were elements of overlap and repetition (especially in blocking) alongside the inevitable differences.

The differences in directorial approach were influenced by several factors. For example, accommodating my vision to the different linguistic medium; available textual variants; two sets of actors; imposed rehearsal patterns; my own greater theatrical experience over the intervening years; and the inevitable effect of seeing several other productions (notably, by the San Quentin group, the French and English (Irish) filmed versions, and Peter Hall's reprise).

I deliberately tried to retain the blocking of my Auckland production, first, because I had given that one much thought and it had worked, secondly, because I had no desire to set my own mark on what I judged to be a staging Beckett would not have objected to.

What did the two experiences, together, teach me? Notably, they brought out strongly what doing more than one production of the same play always teaches one: how much the theatrical (as opposed to textual) phenomenon depends on the character, attitudes, and talents of the actors.

Video-ed extracts from both productions will be used to illustrate some of these and other points.

Dukes, Gerry

Gerry Dukes lectures in literature at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick in Ireland. In 1985, in collaboration with the actor Barry McGovern, he made a theatrical version of Beckett's postwar trilogy of novels. The resulting production, I'll go on, for the Gate Theatre in Dublin, has toured the world. Since then he has contributed essays, reviews and articles to numerous journals, magazines and newspapers. In 2000 his annotated edition of Beckett's novellas was published by Penguin. More recently his Illustrated Lives: Samuel Beckett - a brief biography with over a hundred photographs - was also published by Penguin. He is currently writing a critical study of Synge, Joyce, Beckett and modernist Irish writing.

Englishing En attendant Godot.

Writing to Gerry Dukes in late 1986, Beckett admitted that his "deplorable neglect of successive editions in both French and English" [of the text of Waiting for Godot] had given rise to critical misprisions and confusions. With reference to Beckett's "performance copy" of En attendant Godot (now in Trinity College, Dublin) and his first version English translation of the play (the Pike Theatre Typescript, also in Trinity College) and the subsequent published versions (1954, 1956, 1965, 1993), Beckett's play will be presented as a text which finds its definition on the stage with actors and directors rather than on the page with editors and scholars.

 Luis Gayol & Sergio Amigo

 DIARIES OF HAPPY DAYS IN BUENOS AIRES, 1997-2000

 "It would be much better if you took her out from the mound..." (From a young actor after seeing Happy Days)

During 1997 an Argentinean director and a group of actors founded a theatre company in Buenos Aires, Argentina with the aim of performing Samuel Beckett plays. By the end of that year the company, named precisely "Company" after Beckett's novel, started rehearsing Happy Days, which would be performed in English language for the first time in the country. This was somehow a bit of a shock for an audience that - though possesing a rich cultural life- was not used to classical texts and nevertheless in a foreign language.The experience was supported by the University of Buenos Aires and won the "Theatre of the World Award". From its first performance in January 1998 to the last one in July 2000 at the British Arts Centre in Buenos Aires, the play went through all the circumstances that transformed Argentina from a flourishing environment for theatrical experimentation to its present state of crisis and uncertainty.The present work is an account of those unbelievable, funny and sometimes frustrating years performing Happy Days across the city of Buenos Aires and almost getting to the Falkland Islands!

DOTS AND COMMAS EVEN IN THE SILENCE

Having put myself to the task of drawing with and without words in an empty space, I set my mind on working on two different Beckett plays simultaneously: Not I and Act Without Words (I and II). These works would be presented as part of the Homage to Samuel Beckett organized by the University of Buenos Aires after the tenth anniversary of his death in 1999.

The subject of this paper consists in the analysis of two different types of textures of Beckettian writting: The chaotic cumulus of endless words in Not I where Mouth shouts out her anguish through random words in a sort of non-linear system with odd isles of peculiar order, and on the other hand, if we take Act Without Words I and II, the indications of silent actions given by Beckett make a very linear system, clock mechanism like, with the series of mute actions ordered like the punctuation signs over a particular discourse.

I've tried to apply concepts from Chaos Theory such as fractals, iteration, strange attractors and periodic-aperiodic behaviours. I also worked over the paradox of staging a silent text which offers the possibility of being "read" using all the elements belonging to written language (dots, commas, brackets, etcetera) and a very verbal one where the all the time faster gush of "real" words makes it impossible to be "read" or apprehended.

Germoni, Karine.

France

 "Ponctuation et rythme dans En attendant Godot et Fin de partie".

 Un tel sujet appelle d'abord un préambule terminologique permettant de définir avec précision ce que nous entendons par "rythme" - notion qui est rarement définie avec clarté - et par "ponctuation" qui n'est pas seulement l'ensemble des signes de ponctuation linguistique mais aussi l'ensemble des ponctuants prosodiques qui émaillent les textes dramatiques beckettiens (Un temps; Silence; Pause ). Il s'agit d'abord de montrer comment la ponctuation soutient et crée le rythme linguistique par sa précision quasi mathématique et le dynamisme qu'elle confère au texte, en particulier dans les nombreuses séquences où les mots sont renvoyés "comme des balles". En même temps et paradoxalement, à de nombreuses reprises, le rythme fait place à une di-rythmie lorsque la ponctuation utilisée l'est à contretemps (un signe est employé pour un autre), instaure des coupures franches dans le phrasé, ce qui induit syncopes et points d'orgue. Aussi, bien souvent le texte "cale" pour verser dans l'arythmie: l'utilisation massive du point qui leste véritablement la phrase, la multiplication des silences et des pauses, la récurrence de l'atonie dans l'intonation (voix blanche) tendent à figer le texte, le temps et par conséquent le rythme. Néanmoins, l'opposition entre rythme, di-rythmie et arythmie n'est qu'apparente et se trouve dépassée lorsqu'on envisage l'ensemble des formes que revêt la ponctuation théâtrale becketienne: sur scène, où tout est langage, s'imbriquent inextricablement ponctuation textuelle, scénique et corporelle. Tandis que le langage se corporéise, la gestuelle et la scénographie possèdent leurs propres phrases qui s'inscrivent et se ponctuent sur l'échiquier de la page-scène. Ainsi, les formes de la ponctuation beckettienne et son utilisation douent l'oeuvre théâtrale d'une Rythmique atypique (avec un grand "R", de même que Mallarmé désignait la Musique avec un grand "M") qui, en éprouvant physiquement et physiologiquement l'acteur puis le spectateur, leur permet de toucher l'essentiel et de renouer avec leurs propres rythmes.

 Ghosh, Dr. Ranjan

 Faculty of English,Darjeeling Government College,West Bengal Education Service,India

 Reconfigurating the ‘waiting’ for Godot: interventions within the philosophy of authenticity

Reliving the philosophy of authenticity/inauthenticity, this paper questions the very givenness of the Godot-dominated world of the play - a world which under Hindu philosophy is without the convergent harmony of forces. It is the tamasic state categorized by pramada, alasya (passivity) and nidra (torpor). It is the drugged state reeking in ‘incomprehensibility’ (the Buddhist sense of the term) of the real, a near misguided obstinacy. Devoid of dhrti we find lassitude and undertow of ‘action’ drifting towards a dead level of energy. The paper first takes issue with the word ‘action’ or ‘lack of action’. Is it what we understand as Karma in Hindu philosophy? Or is it Vikarma/Akarma ? Within the premises of Heideggerian authenticity, I choose to emphasize on Vyasa’s karmasu kausalam. In fact the ‘authentic’ modes of existence within such circumstances is Dharma. What awaits the encouragement for growth is the inner nature, the svabhava niyatam karma. In the Hindu philosophy, the word svabhava in its resonance point to the principle of self-becoming which highlights Vladimir-Estragon’s ‘cystallized’ status more perceptively. In trying to trace the origins of authenticity, the paper demonstrates how they falter on the principle of svabhava and its consequent relations to svadharma (a clear correspondence with Heidegger’s ‘Being-in-the-world-with-others’). So what comes to be the de riguer to authenticity is the understanding of the dynamics of ‘action’, the problem of 'reflection' (primarily in the Kierkegaardian sense), the concepts of the world and the self-image.

Following from this development of argument under Hindu philosophy of Karma or the Dharma of Karma, the second part of the paper contrast’s Godot’s Dasein with the inauthenticity of Vladimir and Estragon. Godot’s Dasein is authentic, founded on Dharma. However, its ‘indeterminate identity’ surfaces several ontological possibilities for becoming an authentic Dasein. Phenomenologically, this is the ‘being’ that awaits several ‘becoming’ where the mineness of each mode is ontically realized. ‘Godot will come’ signals no ‘fallenness’ into the world and no inane absorption in Being-with-one-another which would mean that Godot ceases to become present-at-hand for Vladimir and Estragon. However, Dasein for Godot or dharma for that matter cannot remain untouched by ‘everydayness’, the compulsive discursive system of ‘uninhibited hustle’. With the inherent svadharma, Godot is more of a ‘possibility’ than an ‘actuality. Evoking the ‘guilt’ in the ‘givenness’, Godot can be the ‘caller’. The paper explores, here, how Godot’s dharma or authenticity is yet to be realized and how with it the moment of Umkehr is delayed.

As the logical fall-out, the next part of the paper argues how a change from ‘waiting’ (Erwarten) to ‘anticipation’ (Vorlaufen) for Godot aggravates the authenticity-inauthenticity dialectic. Heidegger notes: ‘Anticipation discloses to existence that its uttermost possibility lies in giving itself up, and thus it shatters all tenaciousness to whatever existence one has reached’ (Being and Time, p. 264). I would interpret the Heideggerian anticipation as the ‘active waiting’ in Hindu philosophy. And in a change of existential gear, from waiting (it ‘tranquilizes’ their Being-in-the-world) to anticipation, Dasein’s lostness in the ‘das Man’ is retrieved into a possibility that has ‘anxiety’ and ‘freedom’. The poignance of Zarathustra - ‘This is my way; where is yours?’ - makes us remember Vladimir’s assertion: ‘Vladimir be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle’ (italics mine). This struggle could be their dharma of karma which insinuate a ‘majestic revolt’ (‘I rebel - therefore we exist’ Camus, The Rebel, p. 22). The wine of absurdity and the bread of indifference cannot thwart authenticity and only from chaos is a star born, claims Nietzche. Extricating themselves from 'bad faith', they need o grow the 'rebel-authentic-identity' for if the world has no ultimate meaning, Camus believes that man is the 'only creature to insist on having one'. Even if waiting leads to nihility, the affirmation of an existential ethos counts vigorously in the context of Godot’s Dasein. If any possibility of authenticity exists it is in the ‘affirmation’. The affirmative thrust in their ‘anticipation’ in waiting would delimit those values that initiate authenticity, that promote ‘the desperate encounter’ betwixt our humanity and the ‘silence of the universe’. Godot’s dharma lies in stretching the ‘waiting’; waiting with no result is the authentic ploy to make them answerable to the responsibilities of existence. This is weighing the ‘positive’ out of waiting; this is the moment of their ‘enticement’. The paper thus, finally, argues how Vladimir and Estragon can reach the state of ‘release’ within the complicated matrix of the concept of 'liberation' and 'becoming' in Hindu philosophy, and the overarching philosophy of authenticity of Kierkegaard, Nietzche, Heidegger, and Camus.

The complete amplitude of the thesis uses all the major writings of the four philosphers, Kierkegaard, Nietzche, Heidegger and Camus For discussions from the standpoint of Hindu philosphy, I have significantly drawn critical ideas from the Puranas, Bhagavadgita, related conceptual constructs from Vedic philosophy and sidelights from the Buddhist view of life.

Gibson, Dr Susan

Neutrality in Beckett and Blanchot

This paper will address the who that speaks, does not speak and cannot speak in Beckett’s fictions. Maurice Blanchot’s literary and philosophical writings will be considered in relation to the unnameable but nevertheless loquacious voices that pervade the work of Beckett. Significantly, Blanchot’s preoccupation with the opaque concept of neutrality as "the pure interval" which both interrupts and makes possible speech and silence will be coupled to what Simon Critchley has identified as the "indefatigable ‘I’" in Beckett’s Trilogy. By reading Beckett’s writings through Blanchot, I intend to trace the modernist origins of some fundamental poststructuralist concepts, in particular, "anonymity," "inoperativity," "irreducible singularity" and the "aporia." Of course, Beckett’s fictions cannot be reduced to these philosophical ideas since the very ordinariness of his language resists, parodies and even anticipates the hermeneutical desire to forge such connections. Yet the apparent and professed neutrality of his writings (at least according to Blanchot) will operate as a starting point through which I will approach the place or no place of Beckett’s literature.

Giles, Jana M.

 Department of English Language and Literature, University of New Mexico

The Sublime Narrator: The Triumph of Art in the Early Prose of Samuel Beckett 

This paper examines the early prose of Samuel Beckett in the light of the Romantic sublime as defined by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, and the revised understanding of the sublime offered by Jean-François Lyotard, who detects in Burke the "possibility of emancipating works of art from the classical rules of imitation," and asserts that it is around the sublime that "the destiny of classical poetics was hazarded and lost; it is in this name that aesthetics asserted its critical rights over art, and that romanticism, in other words, modernity, triumphed." Via a broad overview of the early criticism and prose fiction of Beckett, this paper will demonstrate how his work is a radically innovative exploration of the sublime which effectively severs any necessary relation between signifier and signified, fulfilling the postmodern critique of Western metaphysics. Finally, it will read Beckett’s grappling with the sublime as a curious defense of poetry which proceeds by process of elimination and negation, challenging us to become Shelleyan creators, invoking the world anew each day in the face of lasting doubt and the inevitable failure of art. 

Goodall, Jane

Research Director, College of Arts, Education and Social Sciences, Bankstown campus, University of Western Sydney

Lucky's Energy

 When Beckett's Lucky tries to recount the story of the skull in Connemara as documented by the Academy of Anthropometry, his memory of it has disintegrated and he succeeds only in acting out the entropic drama whose script has worn away in his mind. He has become a field of draining vitality, an exemplar of evolution in reverse. Yet he is something other than a textbook case of degeneration. The loss is too strictly mathematical: it is pure subtraction, with none of the florid theatrical side effects associated with decadence. This paper is concerned with how Beckett interests himself in human energy, and with how his apparently perverse commitment to displaying its loss creates an unprecedented form of stage dynamism.

Beckett Performing

Samuel Beckett¹s resistance to self-refexion, to a public meta-text, to theorizing his own, theater, was legendary, and yet his personal letters and notebooks, his intimate, occasionally "uncautious" conversations with directors were replete with just such revelations. While he told critic Colin Duckworth that he could not reflect upon his work, "I'd be quite incapable of writing a critical introduction to my work" (Duckworth xxiv), his own musings recorded in his theatrical notebooks, his letters to directors and publishers constitute, collectively, just such a critical introduction. The disparity suggests something of a multiplicity of voices, diction and contra-diction, a dialectic if not a dialogic relation to his work. In one voice private discourse could echo public posture as it outlined a resistance to and incapacity for self-reflexivity. In a letter of 26 October 1957 to his principal American director, Alan Schneider, Beckett resisted self-reflection, "Sorry I was not of more help about the play [Endgame] but the less I speak about my work the better" (Harmon, 17).

Much of what he struggled to resist was the traditional presumption of authority, what he called the "supposed" privilege of authorship, even as he simultaneously extended it. While he may have recoiled from the image of the omniscient author, projecting for himself instead an image of authorial impoverishment, indigence, and impotence, a diminished author-ity, he nonetheless extended such authority, insinuating the primacy of the playwright, and so extended authorial presence, into the theatrical process (in what was otherwise an age of the director) to an unprecedented extent, first as an "advisor" on productions of his work, then as their primary director, and finally as a specter, a ghost of authority, into the après Beckett. The public posture of diminished authority often became a useful means of deflection, that is, itself a performance, inseparable from the theatricality of the work. As the Beckett canon is extended into the palimpsest that Gerard Genette calls "paratexts," that is, as more of the peripheral, secondary, or what we might call the gray canon comes to light and is made public (letters, notebooks, manuscripts, and the like), it inevitably interacts with, shapes, and re-defines, even from the margins, the white canon, and the more apparent it becomes that Beckett¹s voice was as plural as that of his (other) characters, that he had at least a second or counter voice regarding his work. He had, in short, a great deal more insight into his creations and their circumstances than he revealed (at least directly) in his texts, despite protestations to the contrary. The voice of Beckett we hear as a commentator on his work may best be read as fictive, the creation of his own ideal reader or spectator.

Guest, Michael

Michael Guest is Professor at Shizuoka University’s Faculty of Information and Graduate School of Informatics, both of which he co-founded. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Beckett’s later prose (University of Sydney, 1989), has published articles on Beckett in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, Studies in English Literature (English Literary Society of Japan), and recently reviewed an international Korean production of Waiting for Godot (Sanwoollim Company, Seoul) for the Journal of Beckett Studies. He maintains broad research interests in Japanese arts and culture and English language education, and has published and presented work at international conferences in both these areas. 

Autonomy and the Body in Samuel Beckett and Kobo Abe

Beckett is mentioned sometimes in characterizing Abe’s work, if not as often as Franz Kafka, who is the more evident and acknowledged influence as such. Beckett’s observation on Proust, "The old ego dies hard . . . with a wailing and gnashing of teeth," is not a bad point of differentiation between himself and Abe, whose works and characters fall continually through mad processes of transformation - a far cry, seemingly, from Beckett’s rhetorical grinding down to entropy, stasis and nothingness. Despite this basic stylistic difference, however, Beckett and Abe are most similar in their departures from the staple conventions of literary representation. One may observe in both what may be described as a pronounced aesthetics of autonomy, the effects of which a traditional idea of alienation may tend to misinterpret. Furthermore, techniques of bodily iconoclasm and decentering are common to Abe and Beckett and, I propose, equally important to their aesthetics and to their assaults on genre, as diverse and at times subtle, particularly in Abe, as these may be. An exploratory comparison, this paper attempts to trace the primary themes of bodily representation and aesthetic autonomy to a number of theoretical implications and reflections, with reference to some of Abe’s alliances to surrealism, phenomenology, and contemporary arts.

Hamilton, Geoff

 Geoff Hamilton is a 3rd year PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto, specializing in 20th-Century American Literature.

 Samuel Beckett and the Pastoral Tradition

 While Beckett’s use of the Bible and Shakespeare has been explored at length, his extensive parodies and revisions of the pastoral tradition remain largely uncharted. This paper proposes to sketch an outline of how pastoral themes emerge in several of Beckett’s major works: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and the trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable. Nostalgia for prelapsarian idylls, a preoccupation with notions of what lies ‘outside’ the ruined here and now, failed voyages in the country, elegiac ceremonies linked with the natural world, and indeed the preponderance of ‘humble folk’ (herdsmen in traditional pastoral), are common in Beckett’s work and suggest that the pastoral tradition plays a major role in shaping his imaginative landscapes. With reference to definitive examples of pastoral literature from its more than two thousand year history, as well as to key theorists of the pastoral such as William Empson and Paul Alpers, I hope to highlight some of the revisionary strategies Beckett undertakes, demonstrating ways in which he often prolongs the tradition’s conventions while limning their demise.

Harbin, Leigh

Assistant Professor of English, Angelo State University, Texas

 "Put me right in the center!": Scene Performance in Teaching Waiting for Godot.

American college students often find Beckett’s work particularly challenging and resist his plays as boring and depressing. Following Hamm’s order to Clov, putting students in the center of the work and the classroom through assigned scene performances has proven to be an effective tool for overcoming this resistance. Current literature does not explore the particular value of student performance in teaching Beckett. Scene performance, when it reaches beyond acting classes at all, tends to be relegated to the introductory literature classroom and lauded for improving appreciation and enthusiasm there (see Schevera and Lee). My experience using scene performance in tandem with student-lead analysis in senior and graduate level courses suggests that students refine their own critical skills through the process of making performance choices. In this paper, I will describe this assignment and demonstrate how it allows for greater understanding of Beckett’s absurdism, exposes meta-theatrical elements of the plays, and produces an increased sense of relevance. I contend that this type of pedagogy engages students more personally in critical analysis.

Hatch David A.

 David A. Hatch teaches English and Philosophy at Brigham Young University, Utah, USA. Existing and forthcoming publications include: "'I am mistaken': Surface and Subtext in Samuel Beckett's Three Dialogues" in Samuel Beckett Today, "Beckett’s Fizzles and Filmic Literature" in Interdisciplinary Humanities, and "Blurring the View: Liminality, Race, and Spectatorship" in The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film and Film Theory. His current project is a book-length study entitled Eclectic/Subversive Period: Interdisciplinarity in the Little Magazines.

 "The 'Untidy Analyst': Dialogue Form, Elenchus, and Subversion in 'Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit.'"

 Philosophical dialogue is a peculiar vehicle for criticism; it is engaging, but also deceptive and at times indistinct almost to the point of incoherence. Unfortunately, the common explanation for Beckett’s choice of the dialogue form is based on historical accident instead these formal qualities. Martin Esslin, for example, cautions that the text "may or may not be a true record of conversations that took place" between Beckett and Duthuit. He records that when asked about the conception of the text--"Would it be true to say you wrote down what had been said?"--Beckett responded: "I suppose you might say down, I’d rather say up." Due to this basis on historical conversation perhaps, critics have neglected to consider how form and content function concurrently in the dialogues to communicate the author’s argument. No comprehensive formal analysis of the work exists, and when form is considered critics usually dismiss the dialogue as incidental to the existence of a more traditional argumentative structure which Mark Moes labels a "proto-essay." Beckett critics have subscribed almost universally to these assumptions in their treatment of "Three Dialogues," with the result that the fictional and critical elements of the dialogue form are often conflated, and the subtleties of argument revealed by the reasoning of two or more characters are neglected. My paper accounts for Beckett’s choice of the dialogue as a critical vehicle by means of which arguments are shaped by content and form concurrently. Evidence suggests, for example, that dialogue allows Beckett to subvert traditional critical logic, to "write up" to the cognoscienti, and ultimately, to escape the tautology of trying to express the impossibility of expression.

Hauptle, Carroll

Carroll Hauptle has wide-ranging experience as a director, stage manager and actor in theater, including work with Samuel Beckett and the San Quentin Drama Workshop, on productions of Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape. Additional experience with the Children’s Theater of Minneapolis, and the Cricket Theater of Minneapolis.

Beckett’s dramas, and the Mahayana Buddhist concept of groundlessness: Sunyasha

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Beckett’s drama is that it is dramatic at all. Plot synopses for the dramatic pieces are testimony to their abstract, unreal nature. Even though we may differ with the conclusion ("It is awful".), we must agree with Didi and Gogo that, for the most part, "No one comes. No one goes." What then makes Beckett’s theatrical work so compellingly dramatic? In the end, theater is storytelling, and if the story lacks conflict, evolution or historical interest, then drama is typically lacking.

Nonetheless, there is an undeniable and powerful dramatic urge to these works, entirely separate from their poetic or musical qualities. The realms occupied by these works, dark, mysterious and yet also uniquely comical, do not lend themselves easily to exegesis. Beckett himself warned off interpretations ("No symbols where none intended."). However, it may be possible, without reduction or abstraction, to find a profitable correspondence between the territory of these plays and "sunyasha", a Buddhist concept of groundlessness.

"Sunyasha" is the Mahayana Buddhist expression for the experience of groundlessness so complete that it is may be described as the total absence of comfort. It is emphatically not that oceanic sense that Koestler describes in "Darkness at Noon". Nor is it a feeling of unbounded oneness, promised to the ardent and successful meditator. This is no chemical or hormonal imbalance. It is a frightening, bewildering sense of impending doom, with no means to avoid or prevent it. Uncertainty, fear, desperation, and the need to act, even in the ineluctable face of futility, are its fundamental elements.

To the Mahayana Buddhist scholar, particularly the scholar of Pima Chodron and others, sunyasha is a profoundly common human experience. It can be a fruitful period, which, if faced directly and with courage, can produce great change, great movement. This is considered to be a natural evolution of an existence in which the conscious being, utterly incapable of seeing itself, seeks to liberate itself from the anguish of daily existence. How can one avoid past mistakes, if one is simply largely ignorant of how one makes decisions, or forced to conclude that uncertainty is the order of the day? This uncertainty, and its derivative anguish, forms the skeleton of Beckett’s theatrical work.

Turning to the plays, one finds immediate validation for this correspondence in the opening words of Waiting for Godot: "Nothing to be done" These simple words, spoken as Estragon tosses down his boot in a fit of pique, are later echoed by Vladimir his partner, as the coda to a small canter which seems quite neatly to delineate the dilemma in which these characters find themselves.

There is also evidence in the dramatic mise en scene of these pieces, apart from their language. In Godot, we see an open road, empty, with a tree and a rock. Stark, open, no road signs. Not much help to the traveler. In Endgame the single room, one door, two windows, and the barrels of the progenitors. Not much to occupy. In Krapp’s Last Tape, a solitary den, a chair, a table, and a closet. Not much to work with. In Happy Days, Beckett takes this tendency to possibly its ultimate expression, by burying the lead character up to her waist in the ground. Despite this theatrically "rooted" position, her musings, yearnings and remembrances are no more certain, and no less troubling, than those of Beckett’s other characters.

Could sunyasha share fundamental elements with the territory of these pieces? In these works, we share with these characters, while we share some performance space with them, a glimpse of the groundlessness of being. As readers and audience members, we have all had some experience with this aspect of being. In large part we become intimate with it because every action, every breath, ever utterance of the human condition is a defiance of groundlessness. Because Beckett’s characters also face groundlessness, with varying degrees of courage and humor, and in so doing illuminate the human spirit, their struggle is dramatic.

Hayman, David 

David Hayman is an emeritus professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison He has published widely on modern English, French and Spanish literature with a heavy emphasis on James Joyce and Finnegans Wake. Another emphasis has been Genetic Criticism of Joyce. On this subject he has published A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake; 36 volumes of The James Joyce Archive; The 'Wake" in Transit; and many essays. His work on Beckett began in the late fifties with one of the earliest essays on Molloy ("The Quest for Meaninglessnes"). He is currently writing an in-depth study of the manuscript of Watt following it from the search for a persona through the initial appearance and evolution of the Quin-Knott complex and the Watt perplex to the ultimate reconfiguration of details, plot and structure. In the process he is finding all manner of intriguing and challenging materials. Among them are the illustrative doodles, a variety of literary sources, keys to Beckett's later development, and creative turning points like the one treated in his talk for this conference. He has already published on the doodles and, more importantly on the process leading to the discovery of Knott's first avatar : "Getting Where: Beckett's Opening for Watt " in Contemporary Literature, spring 2002.

"How Two Love Letters Elicited a Singular Third Person: Generating an Ur-Watt."

It was probably mid-March 1942 when Beckett drafted love letter of sorts in French on a verso page of his the first notebook of the Watt manuscripts. The letter describes his emotional state in occupied Paris, suggests his yearning for her, and tells how he passes his time writing, playing the pianoand making furniture. That same page is adorned with an accomplished doodle, a proud young mother pushing a stylized carriage. Previously, in the development of the novel, the narration has been in an ironic omniscient voice. At this point it morphs into the voice of a Ticklepennyesque wag writing a cadging letter to a presumably charitable female supporter. The letter is a comic chez d’oeuvre, an elaborate whine, which deconstructs the writer’s anatomy. Accompanying that account is a fine doodle of the injured artist as artist in faked disabilities. I will show how the process of mocking his own tenderness or seductive powers with words and doodles enabled Beckett to shift gears and move into what became the voice of the first Watt.

This paper is chiefly concerned with the aesthetic implications of casting a blind/visually impaired performer in the title role of this piece. It relates to a process undergone during the early spring of 2002, leading to performance at a short season of new performance work at the Stephen JosephTheatre, Scarborough (UK). In considering aesthetics, the paper seeks to address the ongoing debate surrounding the formal properties of Beckett's poetry and the ways in which these are engaged in the rehearsal process. What added resonances are made available to the spectator when structures of loss and of memory are mediated through a blind actor?

The paper is also interested in the function of technology in this piece: the ways in which analogue systems promote the visceral interface of flesh with machine in a contemporary world of digitised experience. To that end, the paper references the ideas of Philip Auslander in his consideration of the live and the mediatised. To what extent does Beckett's early fascination with audio technology present contemporary audiences with a prescient vision of our attempts to document personal histories? Given the 'politics of perception' built into this production, what status does 'seeing' have in a play written to be seen?

 Hinden, Michael

 Professor of English, Associate Dean of International Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

 The Legacy of Beckett: Stoppard and His Contemporaries

Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard are among the leading dramatists writing for the English-speaking stage. Each has evolved a quirky dramatic vision, and no one would confuse their distinctive theatrical habitats: Shepard's pop-art American farmhouses, Pinter's claustrophic London rooms, Stoppard's literary garage sale, world-class. Yet behind each looms the nimble, brooding presence of Beckett, the progenitor of postmodern theater. All fully acknowledge their indebtedness to Beckett, having absorbed from him a variety of dramatic techniques. Among these are a new concept of plot (cyclical rather than progressive action), of dialogue (a manic loquacity punctuated by silences or metaphysical jokes), and of character (benumbed pairs, trios, or mismatched family members whose identifies shift in disturbing ways as they grapple with unnameable threats).Paradoxically, although it seems he has grown the farthest from Beckett as his own work has evolved, Stoppard's debt to the Irish dramatist remains the most profound. Stoppard once alluded to his favorite Beckett joke, which (he said) "consists of confident statement followed by immediate refutation by the same voice. It's a constant process of elaborate structure and sudden--and total--dismantlement." Beginning with Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard engages Beckett by insisting on certain truth-values even though they have been dismantled--or, to put it differently, because they have been dismantled, he proposes to make them reappear through the illusion of dramatic form. Such is the case with Joyce's defense of art in Travesties, George's defense of ethics in Jumpers, Hannah's defense of reason in Arcadia, and Housman's defense of feeling in The Invention of Love. Stoppard, who knows his Beckett thoroughly, may be the only serious dramatist still writing about the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to characterize his plays as clever but naive or to write them off as parody or pastiche. Stoppard's entire career has been an effort to absorb and work through Beckett, not to get around him.

Broadly speaking, the same may be said of an entire generation of playwrights writing "after Beckett," though Stoppard is his most brilliant heir.

 Hollington, Michael

Professor of English at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail in France

 THE GHOST OF BECKETT IN CONTEMPORARY SCOTLAND: THE CASE OF JOHN HERDMAN

 This paper will assess the avowed debt to Beckett of a major prose writer on the contemporary literary scene in Scotland, also of importance in Scottish Nationalist cultural politics. Herdman writes in what can be thought of as postmodernist relation to the tradition of Scottish Gothic - of Hogg, Scott, and Stevenson, with the double motif prominent in his work. He has evolved in the direction of postmodernist parodic and comic handling of this tradition as a result of reading Beckett. "I definitely associate my discovery of my comic voice with the time when I was immersed in Beckett's fiction...the habit of pursuing ideas and verbal statements to their logical but absurd conclusions," he writes. Using as a start-up the Herdman papers at the National Library of Scotland - an early review of Mercier and Camier for instance, and scattered comments in autobiographical writings - I shall examine Beckett's ghostly presence in his entire work, up to and including THE SINISTER CABARET (2001). I shall be thinking of Derrida on ghosts, as well as (more specifically) of Julian Wolfreys, in e.g. VICTORIAN HAUNTINGS, which adopts a Derridean approach to haunted voices in Gothic fiction. I shall also look at Herdman's relation to his supposed rival Scottish Beckettian James Kelman, whom he dismisses as "essentially Beckett without the humour, which means Beckett without precisely what makes him the great writer he is."

Holt, Dr Matthew

Art, Politics and Difficulty in Beckett and Adorno

In an essay of 1967, Donald Egbert argued that the notion of the avant-garde in art and politics had a common origin in the writings of Saint-Simon. Ever since, to be avant-garde in the area of art was to be avant-garde in the area of politics, and vice versa. This relationship has dominated, whether positively or negatively, all discussions, and perhaps production, of modernist art. Today, this relation is strained, unclear and it is often easier to ignore it than to promote it. In order to investigate the conditions of a return to this common conception of the avant-garde (in other words, to begin thinking and practicing the avant-garde once more) I will reconstitute some of the arguments made by Adorno in his essay on Endgame which, on the one hand, hesitates to ascribe any political message to Beckett’s works but, on the other, claims that this is, precisely, the political aspect of it. But far from leaving us in a political and artistic state of limbo, as is often argued, both Beckett and Adorno can be seen as formulating a politics of the indirect, the abstract, and the difficult. Some of the aspects of this politics will form the paper’s conclusion.

Houppermans, Sjef

Professor of modern French Literature at Leiden University (Holland); co-editor of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui

Échecs et Échéances

"La notion de la chute est essentielle pour beaucoup de textes beckettiens: en réalité on peut dire que c'est une oeuvre "Pour tous ceux qui tombent" ; le temps de la chute est un temps de suspens et de pensum qui désire ne pas aboutir tout en se précipitant ailleurs.

La réalité de l'échec est étroitement liée à la chute. Comme Beckett l'écrit à propos des frères van Velde leur peinture est vraie parce qu'elle matérialise l'échec de la peinture. Dire l'échec sera pareillement la gageure du texte beckettien. Et il ne faudra pas oublier que les échecs avec leur roman familial sousjacent et leur terrible "fin de partie" en un sens 'pluralisent' la faillite de toute stratégie.

Finalement il y a l'échéance: cette asymptomatique menace temporelle qui attire et repousse; bouche qui se hâte vers le silence; mais la véritable échéance ne peut que durer en étant infiniment relancée. Ainsi se dessine, exemplairement, une allégorie du désir. Je lirai certaines pages de "Mercier et Camier" pour établir un petit itinéraire.

Enfin c'est vers le Beckett de "Nacht und Traüme" que je me tourne pour le suivre sur la trace de Schubert. Et pour constater comment le joueur de vielle de la "Winterreise" résume tout échec et toute échéance."

Speaker's name

Inoue, Yoshiyuki

Biographical details

Yoshiyuki Inoue, Professor of English, School of Science and Technology, Meiji University, Tokyoa and co-editor of Beckett Taizen (Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 1999), has researched manuscripts at the Beckett Archives, The International Beckett Foundation, Reading; Ohio State University; and Trinity College, Dublin. He contributed a paper entitled "The Dream in Beckett's Ohio Impromptu" to the Beckett Seminar, University of Reading in 2000. Has recently completed a study on The Lost Ones, entitled "Beckett's Cosmology in The Lost Ones: a comparison with Dante's Divine Comedy", and he is presently finishing another monograph, "Creation of a Microcosm: Beckett's Lost Ones and Pre-Socratic Philosophers".

Title of paper

Dante under the Microscope: Beckett's Modernity in The Lost Ones

Abstract

The Divine Comedy is a ladder. Dante and Virgil descend the ladder in Hell; in Purgatory, however, they ascend it, "lo duca mio, e io appresso, soli." In Paradise, the ladder is suggested by the word "grade" (grado in Italian), which is "one of a flight of steps = degree" in the OED. Dante and Beatrice proceed towards the Empyrean, grade by grade. Likewise, Beckett¹s Lost Ones consists of the ladder. "[T]he only objects" in the cylinder are the ladders. Moreover, the inside of the cylinder is filled with ladders: "degrees", "graduat[ion]", and "scale."

The bodies in the cylinder are called "little people." They are probably observed through a microscope. For, although the most obvious figure of Beckett¹s cosmos was the sphere, it¹s cylindrical here. This change indicates an inspection through the microscope. Such "microscopical observation" (M. Nicolson) enables Beckett to perceive "missing" links in the chain of being. According to E. M. W. Tillyard, this chain is also a ladder. Those intervals are expressed as the missing "rungs" of the ladder in The Lost Ones. Certainly, as Curtius says, Dante had to leap some grades in Paradiso to touch upon the affairs which couldn¹t be depicted in their very nature. But this leap can be grasped as a statement of Beckett¹s aesthetics: "L¹art adore les sauts." His adoration of the void can also be connected with the return to Democritean atomism in modern science.

Ishii, Wendy (with Eric Prince)

Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Bas Bleu Theatre, Fort Collins, Colorado, and Instructor of Acting at Colorado State University. As a performer in New York played principal roles in theatre, film, commercials and daytime television. Played the Woman in an original adaptation of Beckett‚s Ill Seen Ill Said for the IFTR World congress in Canterbury, UK, 1998. Also played Winnie in highly acclaimed production of Happy Days for Bas Bleu and for the International Beckett Festival, Victoria, British Columbia in 1996. Currently working with Dr Eric Prince on Voices from the Dark - a trilogy of Beckett plays - Come and Go, Footfalls, and Embers. for the Fall 2002 Season at Bas Bleu Theatre.

Séance - Summoning Old Ghosts to New Stages

This presentation combines analysis and commentary from the writer of Séance (Eric Prince) with performance from the remarkable American actress, Wendy Ishii. Séance was written as an attempt to demonstrate that the formal aesthetic devices of Beckett¹s late dramatic works - the ghost plays - could be incorporated into new modes of performance and writing. Séance was originally produced as a UK National Student Theatre Production for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1993. It was later restaged, in 1997, in Colorado by the Bas Bleu Theatre Company of Fort Collins, featuring its founder artistic director Wendy Ishii. A lone woman, Gwen, seated at her kitchen table mysteriously attempts to summon the ghost of her dead husband, Ken, with some success but at a strange and unexpected price... " Séance is a wonderful piece of theatre...alluring, highly erotic, filled with strange dark secrets." (-Glen Walford, NSDF and freelance theatre director). The presentation should entertain and enliven debate on the nature of Beckett¹s late drama and its significance for writers and theatre practitioners.

 Jones, Laura

 Dr. Laura Jones is an associate professor and Director of the Theatre Program at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA. She holds degrees from Northwestern University, the University of Illinois, and the University of Denver. Her doctoral dissertation was entitled "Alan Schneider’s Direction of Selected Monologue Works by Samuel Beckett." Dr. Jones has directed critically acclaimed productions of Happy Days, Play, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Ohio Impromptu. In 1999 Jones staged Happy Days as commissioned by Southampton College of Long Island University to be performed as the centerpiece of a series of Beckett workshops including a special showing of Waiting for Beckett with commentary by the documentary filmmaker John Reilly. In 1998 Dr. Jones developed a script posing the possibilities of a dramatic interpretation of Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said as an academic exercise for the focus ("The Staging of Beckett’s Non-Dramatic Works") of the Beckett Working Group at the World Congress of the International Federation of Theatre Research in Canterbury, UK. In 1996 her rendition of Happy Days with Wendy Ishii of Bas Bleu Theatre Company was one of twenty international productions of Beckett plays chosen to perform at the University of Victoria Beckett Festival in British Columbia, Canada. This same production was performed at Colorado College by special invitation of Dr. Ruby Cohn, Artist-in-Residence from the University of California, Davis. Dr. Jones teaches performance theory and criticism as well as the practical applications of directing and she has advised students in the staging of Beckett’s work on numerous productions including Come and Go, Rockaby, and Waiting for Godot.

 The Considerations of Staging ILL SEEN ILL SAID

 The dynamic presence of a skilled actress, the spoken words intoned by a disembodied voice, and the seemingly random roving of a single beam of light are key elements in this hypothetical staging of Samuel Beckett’s prose work Ill Seen Ill Said. This paper outlines the sequence of conceptual choices and interpretative decisions encountered by director, performer, and designer/technician. Acknowledging that the primary task in adapting Beckett’s non-dramatic literature for performance is to discover effective means of translating the ambiguities of the text with precision and specificity, numerous acoustical and spatial dimensions are suggested, analyzed, and evaluated. Addressing such diametrical oppositions as the treatment of darkness and light, the tension between sound and silence, and the relationship between a male narrator and the female subject of his narration, this exploration suggests both familiar staging conventions from Beckett’s earlier dramatic works and less predictable solutions to intriguing challenges. It is the purpose of this presentation to offer a practical illustration of the many complex considerations involved in transferring Beckett’s prose work from the page to the stage.

Kennedy, Séan

Government of Ireland Scholar at National University of Ireland, Galway

ŒThe artist who stakes his being is from nowhere¹: Historicising Beckett

This paper argues the need for a historical reading of Beckett¹s writings by focusing, in particular, on the 1930s. In Proust (1931) and "Recent Irish Poetry" (1934), Beckett describes a deracinated ontology of Œman and mess¹, bracketing off the social and cultural determinants of identity in order to construct a myth of the Œartist from nowhere¹. My aim is to counter that myth, using historical and archival sources to place Beckett¹s writings within the context of his Church of Ireland (Protestant) identity. Beckett¹s relationship to Protestantism is especially evident in his rejection of the cultural agenda of Ireland¹s post-independence Catholic elite. Therefore, the paper pays special attention to Beckett¹s disagreement with the Irish poet Thomas MacGreevy regarding the painter Jack B. Yeats. MacGreevy, a staunch Catholic and nationalist, felt that Yeats was Ireland¹s first Œtruly national¹ Irish artist, whereas Beckett felt that Yeats¹s work resisted Œstock assimilations to holy patrimony, national and other¹. I argue that this difference can be attributed to Beckett and MacGreevy¹s different cultural and religious positioning in the Irish Free State, and to Beckett¹s anxiety to escape the strictures being imposed by an emergent ŒIrish Ireland¹. My concern, in emphasising Beckett¹s cultural situation in Ireland, is to insist on the absolute centrality of a range of specific ideological conditions to a full appreciation of his work.

Knowles, Sandra

PhD student at the University of New South Wales, Australia

Beckett’s Endgame and the Diary Form : Readings of Meaningless Narrative

This paper explores the way narrative functions across genres through a comparison of Beckett’s Endgame and the diary form, asking the question - what makes a narrative meaningful? Beckett’s work offers an excellent example of how complicated narrative can be. He disrupts the way narrative generally functions, effacing contradictions and making us believe that it imitates universal human codes. The diary similarly reveals that meaning is fluid and challenges reader interpretation by disrupting the traditional narrative framework.

This paper explores what the consequences are of a disrupted narrative. In Endgame, as in the diary, meaning does not arise from a sequence of events. A consequence of this can be alienation from a unified sense of self as subjects are dislocated and consciousness fragmented. The narrative is used instead to emphasise habitual, repetitive living in the form of a waiting game that never develops. I would also argue that both diary and play challenge the divide between writing and experience. Neither the diary or Endgame achieve meaninglessness, but instead challenge the way meaning is traditionally perceived to function in narrative. Both reveal a coherency within an incoherent framework which complicates the notion of narrative flow and narrative end. Through an analysis of these ideas, this paper has a valuable contribution to make to studies of Beckett through comparing genres and considering Beckett’s significance and influence in terms of narrative structure and reader interpretation.

Kondo, Masaki

A graduate of The Department of English Literature, Tokyo University, Masaki Kondo is Professor of English, Meiji University and Lecturer in English Literature at the Graduate School, Sensyu University. He is a member of The Samuel Beckett Research Circle, Japan; editor and contributor to the Samuel Beckett Encyclopaedia Beckett Taizen; and ex-director of the Japan Society of Image, Arts and Science. He is author of Eizo to Gengo (Image and Language), Kinokuniya-shoten Press; Eizogengo to Sozoryoku (Image Language and Imagination), San'ichi Shobo Press; Mieru Zo to Mienai Zo (The Visible and Invisible Image), Soujusha Press; Mirukoto to Katarukoto (Seeing and Talking), Seidosha Press; Eizo, Nikutai, Kotaba (The Image, Body and Word), Sairyusha Press; Me to Kotoba (Eyes and Words), Soujusha Press; along with many essays on Samuel Beckett. His theses on Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Joyce's Voice, and Beckett's Letters, were accepted for inclusion in "the Memoir of the Institute of the Humanities Meiji University 2003".

Ill Seen Ill Said and Igitur

In Ill Seen Ill Said the vagueness of seeing rather than the unreliability of speaking is presented in the images of memory, illusion and fantasy. It consists of the observation of some scenes in detail, the description of the movement, angle, light and shadow, the suggestion of impersonal eyes or a void where words are uttered as a concave, invisible darkness, and the expression of this state as the end of sight and words, and the beginning of a nothingness which is nothing but Beckett¹s literature.Å@Mallarmé¹s Igitur holds critical clues for our understanding of the mysterious Ill Seen Ill Said. Beckett might be said to have transformed Mallarmé¹s poetic work into fragments of filmic images in an Irish countryside. In Mallarmé¹s concept of existence, "Le personage" believes that Absoluteness reduces the accident to infinity, while he becomes impersonal and there remains the purity of his family after Absoluteness disappears. Beckett gazes or fails to gaze on the eternal transition of time in heaven and landscape with impersonal eyes, which themselves are to become the ruins of the organ threaded with an impotent line of words as in Worstward Ho.