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A-K

Laughlin, Karen

Assoc. Professor, Department of English, Florida State University

Beckett d’après Beckett: Self-Citation and the Postmodern Subject in Beckett’s Late Plays

Beckett’s late plays are filled with theatrical references as well as seemingly self-conscious echoes of his earlier work. An early manuscript of That Time, for example, suggests that the play is "like something out of Beckett" while, in Catastrophe, the bowed figure of P in his ash-colored attire recalls Endgame and the madman’s vision recounted by Hamm. Titles such as Catastrophe and A Piece of Monologue, like the earlier Play, use specifically theatrical terms. These elements are often read as examples of a postmodern reflection on the creative process and a display of Beckett’s own lyric voice. Yet, the playful title of Ohio Impromptu notwithstanding, the fixed, expressive poses of the characters in several of these plays also elicit the classical form of the theatrical tableau, with its carefully inscribed images of what Joseph Roach has called the "micropolitics of daily life." Whereas Catastrophe shows us the often unstable and ambiguous power relations involved in staging the tableau, plays like Ohio Impromptu and A Piece of Monologue play on the gaps between their concentrated stage images, the speakers, and the discourse of human relationships these speakers articulate. In so doing, they provide a postmodern counterpart of the classical tableau, raising questions, as Jonathan Kalb suggests, about "what is and is not ‘I.’" This paper considers the instances of self-conscious theatricality and self-citation (or of Beckett himself writing d'après Beckett)in these plays as ways to destabilize both the construction of the unified subject and the power relations this construction implies.

 Louar, Nadia

 Phd Student, French Department University of California, Berkeley

 Pas d'après: le bilinguisme de Samuel Beckett.

 Avec la publication de la trilogie en anglais dans les annÈes 50, commence parler d'une œuvre bilingue, et partir de ce moment, la question de la langue, maternelle et étrangère, se complique. Toutes les lectures critiques laissant supposer le choix du français contre une langue maternelle équivoque ne peuvent logiquement rendre compte du retour l'anglais et du va et vient consécutif entre les deux langues. 

L'íhypothèse avancée dans ma dissertation est que la littérature de Samuel Beckett s'efforce de ne pas engendrer de discours que le lecteur et/ou critique peut reprendre son compte et auquel il peut s'identifier. Elle refuse d'instaurer un discours que d'autres perpétuent, elle refuse de créer un auteur, l'nstigateur de discours que Michel Foucault définit dans son célébre essai. La littérature bilingue de Beckett s'applique ne pas créer de lignée afin de ne pas succomber au leurre de l'originalité. 

Ne pas suivre les traces et ne pas en laisser est ce que le bilinguisme de l'œuvre tente d'accomplir. Neutraliser l'originalité, c'est aussi neutraliser la tradition dans laquelle chaque artiste se trouve enfermé et confronté. En faisant en sorte que chaque version de ses textes puisse se revendiquer la vraie, la seule et l'unique, aucune ne peut prétendre au statut d'originalité : ni celle Ècrite en premier, ni celle Ècrite dans la langue maternelle, ni toutes celles Ècrites par l'auteur. En révoquant l'autorité hièrarchique de l'original sur la traduction, et en imposant un va et vient constant entre les deux, les limites de l'œuvre deviennent prècaires et peuvent peut-être Èchapper la taxinomie traditionnelle. 

Luscher-Morata, Diane

I was born in Switzerland in 1973 and I am a French and Swiss citizen, my mother tongue is French. I studied French and English literature, as well as Old French at the Université de Neuchâtel (Switzerland) and obtained a Licence-ès-lettres in 1999. In the course of my studies in Switzerland, I wrote a thesis on 'Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe', supervised by Professeur Jean Borie. I moved to England in November of 1999.

In 2000, I started a PhD on Samuel Beckett (entitled 'The Impact of the Second Word War upon Beckett's prose and drama') at the University of Reading, under the supervision of Dr Mary Bryden.

 Watt’s voicing of suffering: ‘a soliloquy under dictation’

This paper will examine Watt’s passage from a state of despair to one of stupor. The tale about his past springs from him, putting into word his silent inner lamentation. Watt is a figure of suffering and not an abstract replica of man. He suffers continuously without interacting with his environment. No acts other than acts of absolute passivity can be ascribed to him. Watt becomes the first ‘deviser of himself for company’ in Beckett and the first to be compelled to ‘soliloquize under dictation’. Watt is the first ‘narrator/narrated’: his role in the telling being a non-role. The asylum in Watt is the place where words are spoken, in which Watt voices a past; it is a place and a state (one of ‘windowlessness’) of a figure turned towards its centre. All that lies outside or beyond it seems to be locked and obscure. The voice comes from a ‘un monde fini’, which ‘sa fin suscita’; its tale is transcribed by another. In this paper I shall analyze the way in which suffering is told through Watt rather than by him and try to discover how it can be heard.

Macris, Anthony

Dr Anthony Macris teaches creative writing and textual theory at the University of Wollongong. His novel, Capital, Volume One (Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1997, London 1998) was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize: Best First Book. He is currently working on Capital, Volume One, Part Two.

Beckett, Simon and the mise en abyme of paradoxical duplication

In his seminal study of novelistic mise en abyme structures, The Mirror in the Text, Lucien Dällenbach identifies a type that he terms the mise en abyme of paradoxical duplication. Characterised by an extreme self-reflexivity wherein the traditional mise en abyme's frame-and-miniature structure implodes, Dällenbach explores the operations of this literary trope in the context of the later novels of the nouveau roman, particularly those of Claude Simon and Samuel Beckett. In this paper I will discuss how Simon and Beckett employ this structural device in their novels with radically different results, Simon's forming part of a textual poetics that engages with the material and social, while Beckett's tends to privileging of the self-reflexivity of language.

Martin, William

 William Martin is a Ph. D student in the School of English at the University of New South Wales, who is currently researching the dual notions of "corporeality" and "text" within the context of French deconstruction and phenomenology. Of potential use for cinematic and literary analysis is his current interpretation of Berkeley's "Essay towards a New Theory of Vision", an essay which founded the modern concept of "kinaesthesis".William recently delivered a paper titled "Feedback in 2001" at the "What's Left of Theory" conference held in December last year at the University of Tasmania, and is planning to study in France in 2003.

 Esse and Percipi in Beckett's FILM:

 The notes that Beckett sent to Alan Schieder during the making of FILM begin with Berkeley's famous principle esse est percipe. Even though Beckett claims that "no truth value attaches to above, regarded as of merely dramatic and structural convenience", the convention that Beckett establishes between the camera's Eye (E) and the protagonist (O), sets up a dialectic between being and non-being, which effectively structures the cinematic relationship between self and other. FILM can be interpreted as a text that occupies the border between language and perception, for on the one hand, the opening "sssh" which hushes-up the soundtrack, announces that the film will be silent in the act of becoming audible; whereas on the other hand, the notes state in language (which is an abstraction for Berkeley) that 'to be is to be perceived'. The problematic is resolved however when Bustor Keaton realizes at the end of FILM that the Eye (E) is the Object (O) - that he is simultaneously seeing himself seeing (E=O). The final shots which suture the beginning of the film to its end, invaginate Beckett's notes into the body of the filmic text.

Mason, Clara

 JAMES JOYCE FOUNDATION

McCarthy, Gerry.

Gerry McCarthy is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Ulster. He has worked practically on many of Beckett's plays, and published discussions of practice and the epistemology of performance in Modern Drama and in Directing Beckett and Beckett On and On edited by Lois Oppenheim and Marius Buning

 Occasions of Indeterminacy in Beckett’s Sacred Text

 This paper takes up the question of the ‘dictatorial’ text which Beckett delivers to the theatrical practitioner, and argues that the dramatist exhibits no more than a clear awareness of the notational value of any text designed to promote intelligent practice in theatrical space (or in other media of presentation). In this respect Beckett’s legacy a precious, addressing and conserving the fundamental practices of human performance within the social group which is created by the enactment of the drama.

The other side of this question arises from a consideration of the experience of performance in Beckett by those whose is business is the acting of the play rather than its direction or interpretation. For actors the text is demanding and often extremely precise. This paper suggests that such precision addresses almost analytically the range of human capacity in the face of problems of knowledge and action. These are played within the matrix of time and space which defines the performer and is known to the performer and thereby the spectator in the sensual process of embodiment. The interest of the actor‚s view is consuming at those points where precision leads to a necessary sequence of action where the links of causality are difficult if not impossible to conceive in the reflective modes of contemporary direction.

The Beckett text appears to lead accurately to a point of indeterminacy. The value of this condition is argued as a fundamental datum of dramatic practice.

Mease, Ellen

I chair the Theatre department and teach drama and interdisciplinary humanities at Grinnell College, where over the years I've been able to direct Godot, Endgame, and most of Beckett's short plays and some adapted prose (Fizzles, Imagination Dead Imagine), usually in conjunction with my Beckett seminar and acting classes. At Stanford in the early 70s I worked with Charles Lyons, Ruby Cohn, Martin Esslin, and Alan Schneider (for whom I ADed a production of Godot).

 "Gender and Genre in Ill Said Ill Seen and the Late Plays"

 Charles Lyons, in his "Male or Female Voice" (Women in Beckett, 150-161), took up the twinned problems of gender and genre in Beckett's late fiction and drama, directing our attention not only to the later works' subversion of the epistemological and ontological status of the narrative event in both prose and the drama, but also to the potential aesthetic problems arising from adaptation of the prose for theatrical enactment. Lyons plausibly argued that "companion" novella), has no reality status--as referent, as image, as idea--beyond its rhetorical function as a dimly conceived/perceived object sustaining the act of narration. A cipher dimly in mind's eye who exists only in the language which describes it, the figure of the old woman is not figured as a self-determining subject, but a part-object subject to the needs of the consciousness producing the narration or a persona-prop for the act of narration itself.

While the female figure of ISIS is produced and finally consumed as a verbal artefact--the haze of failed memory engulfing her, the novel's object no longer seen, no longer sayable, and scribbler stilled (if indeed the scribbler's efforts to end are successful)--in the Beckett plays the immediacy of the actor in her sheer physical presence makes a similar dramatic attempt to deconstruct the subject especially difficult of achievement

In the late narrative plays--Footfalls, Rockaby, Not I--the spectator is invited despite various displacements to identify the perceived theatrical presence (however rudimentary--the vivid Mouth, the tangled tatters) with the actions and events of the narration, whether past or present, spoken or taped. Narration and character refer to one another. The relationship between narrating consciousness and theatrical figure is quite different from that which obtains between ISIS's narrating subject and the object which serves as both its cross and its raison d'être.

The narrative voice of ISIS is not the old woman's, but the old woman serves, like the Unnamable's vice existers or Malone's Macmann, as a surrogate self, through whose "experience" the narrative consciousness seeks to find its proper end and a release from the obligation to express. Or, to implicate yet another genre, the old woman is to the ISIS narrator as Woburn is to Voice in the radio play Cascando; the speaker's task is to hit upon the right ending action--Woburn hastening to shore and drifting out to sea, the old woman dimmening toward death--to get itself discharged from the bardic office.

How gendered is the generic narrative consciousness? How do we (en)gender Beckett's prose narrators? Many of us are influenced by powerful performance images like Warrilow's explorer/narrator of Mabou Mines' Lost Ones. The narrating consciousness of the trilogy--proto-human Worm--seems embryonically male, given its many male avatars and vice-existers--Molloy, Moran, Malone, Macmann, Mahood. Yet Maddy, May, Winnie (Worm's "W" in female form) and many

of the late female characters, among the most numinous in modernist drama, belong as well to the company of surrogate selves, drag avatars.

Mehta, Xerxes

Xerxes Mehta is the Artistic Director of the Maryland Stage Company and teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The current president of the Samuel Beckett Society, he has written about and directed Beckett's shorter plays for many years.

Mével, Yann

Professeur de Lettres (Rennes). Thèse de Doctorat consacrée à l'imaginaire mélancolique dans les romans de Beckett. Membre de la Beckett Society (Etats - Unis) et de l'association "La Maison Samuel - Beckett" (Roussillon , France) . Co-directeur et co-éditeur du colloque international "L'affect dans l''œuvre beckettienne" (Université Rennes 2, 1999; Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, no.10, 2000). Co-directeur du colloque international "Présence de Beckett. Samuel Beckett au centre des transformations culturelles du XXe siècle", Centre culturel de Cerisy (France , Normandie), été 2005. Publications sur l'œuvre de Beckett: -"Beckett et le terrain vague de la mélancolie", in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, no.11, 2002 (actes du congrès de Berlin). -"Beckett géomètre ", in Cahiers de théorie littéraire, no.2 , 2001, Université Paris 7 . -"Sous le signe de Cronos: cannibalisme et mélancolie dans les romans de Beckett" , in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, no. 10, 2000. -"Molloy: jeux et et enjeux d'un savoir mélancolique ", in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, no. 8, 1999. -"En attendant Godot: éléments pour une étude de la théâtralité", in Lectures de Beckett (sous la direction de Michèle Touret), Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1998.

"Après ou d'après Beckett? Joël Jouanneau metteur en scène de Beckett"

J. Jouanneau me semble l'un des principaux metteurs en scène français de Beckett de la dernière décennie. Son travail, qui compte au moins cinq mises en scène de Beckett entre 1991 et 2001, est fait pour une part en collaboration avec David Warrilow. Sa mise en scène d'En attendant Godot a suscité quelques polémiques, au contraire des spectacles ultérieurs: il faudrait s'interroger sur le sens de cette apparente évolution (relativisée par la réapparition fréquente d'une même équipe autour de Jouanneau). L'analyse, à la fois diachronique et synthétique, de ce travail de mise en scène poserait notamment la question, récurrente mais importante, de la fidélité et de l'émancipation par rapport aux textes et mises en scène de l'auteur. Elle s'appuierait sur des documents iconographiques, des entretiens (y compris, si possible, des entretiens personnels avec J.Jouanneau), des dossiers de presse ... et mon expérience de spectateur.

 Mihalevschi, Dr. Mircea

I am professor at the University Spiru Haret’ in Bucharest ‹ Romania and Head of the French Department within the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures. I give courses on the 20th century French literature and workshops on contemporary theatrical discourse.

In 1973 and 1974 I prepared my doctorate theses at the Sorbonne III. I did research under Anne Übersfeld. In the same period I frequented L¹École Pratique de Hautes Études’ (workshops with Roland Barthes) and I was initiated in the Philosophical circles of Tel Quel’ by Hélène Cixous.

In 1981 I defended my doctorate theses called Le Personage du Nouveau Theatre Français. I gave conferences on Beckett at the L¹Université Lyon II’ (in January 2000) and at the Goethe Universität’ of Frankfurt (in December 2000). I participated with a paper on New Theatre in France at the world congres of the IFRF (in July 2002).

My most recent publications are Les Dysfonctionnements métaphoriques’ (Fundatia Romania de Maine, Bucharest 2002, 170 pages) and Le Renouvellement du discours littéraire au XX-ème siécle’ (Fundatia Romania de Maine, Bucharest 2002, 180 pages), with significant chapters on Samuel Beckett.

 The voice of Beckett on the contemporary crossroads of the episteme

First I will identify and formulate a few distinctive features of Beckett¹s vision:

• The disorder will never be able to reduce itself into order; what we can do is to adjust our life (and our strategies against adversity, too) to it.

• Because the subject subtracts itself to our traditional descriptive approach, we must figure out new strategies which are, as Beckett said, Œle monopole de la boîte cranienne¹

• ŒLecturing¹ the world (and in the same time the texts of Beckett) is to refuse the vulnerable, binary logic (the contrary of things being a major, insolvable interrogation in Beckett¹s work). Such a reading is made according to plural logic. For Beckett the fact that "the world is a pair of trousers, bad tailored by God" makes "the joy of life" (le plaisir de l¹existence). According to the plural logic, this joy will be simultaneously interpreted as anti-phrase and its literally meaning. The confrontation of every human action with the disorder of the world is the sine qua non condition of the existence of life. Illustrating A. Artaud¹s principle, it¹s up to us to convert Œthe mere force of being hungry¹ in a superior way of practicing life.

• After Jankélévitch (L¹Ironie), we are able to turn everything in derision, but not the whole (Œle monde¹). The final contemplation of the general gâchis (Œthis lamentable waste!¹) is for Beckett identified with the state of Œgrace¹ raised by the Œmémoire affective¹ of Proust, giving back the pathetic and the noblesse of the human aspirations. Beckett¹s theatre is not tragic and derisory but tragic because derisory.

In the second part of the paper I will identify new strategies proposed by Beckett for possible conversion of the adversity in its contrary. His contribution can represent a major component for the future coordinates of the Œcondition humaine¹ in the XXIth century: Œla condition humaine médiate¹ (confronted with the contingent). The theatrical, literary and artistical creation after Beckett is determined by the epystemologic crisis that we continuously go through. I will demonstrate the fact that the meaning of Beckett¹s creation is far from having been accessible for us up to the present moment.

Beckett has not only influenced the nowadays creation, but has also anticipated it. That is why, it is not a figure of speech, but a reality which I will focuss on: the moment of the present creation is after Beckett and, at the same time, before Beckett.

Speaker's name

Mori, Naoya

Biographical details

Naoya Mori is Professor of English at Kobe Women¹s University, and Seto Jr College, Japan. and Secretary of the Beckett Research Circle, Japan. He studied Beckett¹s manuscripts at the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading as a fellow of the British Council in 1988-89. He is co-editor of Beckett A to Z (Beketto Taizen, 1999) and co-translator of the Japanese version of James Knowlson¹s Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (Beketto den, to be published in 2001). A recently published paper in Japanese on Beckett is, "Samuel Beckett¹s monad, machine, and otherness: a windowless dramaturgy" in Shiso (Oct. 2001): 147-64.

Title of paper

Beckett¹s Window and ŒWindowless Self¹

Abstract

In one of the manuscripts of his last prose piece Stirrings Still, Samuel Beckett writes: ŒSo in his windowless self that no knowing whether day or night¹ (Reading University Library MS2935/1). The room of this moribund old man is not, in fact, windowless, but it has one high window. Mysterious, however, is this closed clouded window that sheds Œits faint unchanging light unlike any light.¹ What does this window represent?

The window thus embodied is not an ordinary window but a metaphysical device, or an allusion rooted in the Monadology of Leibniz. What Beckett intended to convey by the mysterious window and Œwindowless self¹ must be considered in this context.

Retrospectively, Beckett had used the window device for about fifty years, from Œa small frosted skylight¹ of Murphy as the prototype, until the last window of Stirrings Still. The image evokes a condition of issueless mind inhabited by protagonists including, for example, Murphy, Watt, Malone and Hamm. Beckett¹s strategic use of the Œwindowless self in his works will lead us to reconsider how his view of the self and otherness was affected by Leibniz.

Musgrave, Dr David

 Enthymemic Silence and the Modernist Grotesque in Beckett’s Prose Works

The role of silence in Beckett’s oeuvre has been much remarked upon: as a response to the horrors of the modern age; as an instance of the nullity or entropy of all meaning; as a dramatic tool. This paper will examine silence in certain Beckett novels and shorter prose works in terms of a device known as the enthymeme, a rhetorical syllogism in which one premise is unexplained, omitted or assumed. "Enthymeme" literally translates from the Greek as "something located in the heart or mind" (Volosinov, Freudianism, 100) and is suggestive of Bakhtin’s notion of the material lower bodily stratum. Analysed together with Bakhtin’s idea of the "threshold situation" or "threshold dialogue"–a feature in nearly all of Beckett’s work–this paper will examine the role of silence in Beckett’s prose works, particularly with regard to the twelve intervals separating the thirteen texts of Texts for Nothing and the eight hundred and twenty-five gaps separating the utterances of How It Is. In general, it will argue against those readings which emphasis the paucity, nullity or nihilism of Beckett’s texts and argue that their enthymemic character posits a modernist grotesque concerned with the discovery of the new.

 Nijjem, John

Post graduate student at Sydney University in the Department of Philosophy.

 It'd give us an erection: Necrophilia and the ontology of death in Samuel Beckett.

The nature of the human relationship with death, and with the other in the light of death, as it is all portrayed in certain of Samuel Beckett's works is one that can be tentatively thematised in terms of multiple and various discourses. In this paper I will focus on these thematics under the aspects of the thought of three or four philosophers: Augustine, Nietzsche, Derrida and Heidegger. I will examine what could be construed as a peculiar ontology of death and the 'death relation' implicit in several of Beckett's works though especially in Waiting For Godot, Endgame and The Unnamable.

It is to Estragon's suggestion that the two hang themselves that Vladimir responds with the somehow essentially unexpected "It'd give us an erection". Necro-philia reconstrued as an ontological category and provisionally mapped on to both Nietzsche¹s voluntaristic thanatology and Heidegger's Daseinanalytic, yet, at all points, taken along with its attendant senses of the perverse, the tragicomic and the bathetic, will serve as the guiding concept in this paper.

The notion of suicide, never far from the questioning centre of Beckett's work, will be understood as underpinning the ontological appropriation of the pathological concept of 'necrophilia.' The concept of necro-philia (taken here as the 'love of or attraction toward death') will be used heuristically as a means of bringing out the idiosyncratic force of the always oblique presentation of death in Beckett's texts.

Works of other artists and dramatists will also enter the discussion ­ most saliently those of Shakespeare, Donne, Tolstoy and Stoppard.

English Department Shahid Beheshti University Tehran, Iran

Dr Amir Ali Nojoumian, born in 1964, received his BA degree in English Language and Literature from Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran in 1989. He later pursued his studies through the MA course in Modern Literature: Theory and Practice at the University of Leicester, UK. He graduated with a distinction in 1994 and started his PhD course under the supervision of Dr Philip Shaw at the same university in the same year. His Thesis entitled Deconstructing the Name: Three Theological Paradoxes of Language in Literary Discourse was defended in July 1999. He is now a full-time lecturer at Shahid Beheshti University and has been teaching English Literature at BA and MA levels. His main research interests include contemporary literary theory, modern fiction, modernist and postmodernist literature, and deconstruction.

". . . I shall have to speak of things which I cannot speak. . . . I am obliged to speak. I shall never be silent. Never." (Samuel Beckett, _The Unnamable_)

"Death strolls between letters." (Jacques Derrida)

In this paper I would argue that The Unnamable, as a monologue told by an unnamable narrator, is the story of a search to define and name oneself, to examine the role of language in this regard, to look at the beyond’ and its possibility, and finally to assess the possibility of silence within’ and beyond’ language and being. In order to discuss the above signifying forces’ of the novel, it seems inevitable to read the novel in the light of deconstruction.

The Unnamable is an example of literary discourse with close relations to apophatic discourse. While dealing with the theme of ineffability and negation throughout, the structure of the novel also demonstrates the limitations and pains’ of both language and self. The paper explores the following main themes that are both stated and’ enacted in the novel:

1) The language of the novel is based on aporias and paradoxes. Beckett puts the notion of dualism into question. The binary oppositions of body/spirit, negation/affirmation, silence/speaking, self/other, and subject/object as recurrent motifs of the novel are constantly deconstructed.

2) The negation of the subject (self) is juxtaposed to the negation of language. They are both under erasure’. I’ and more generally the name’ are persistently negated, yet language paradoxically emerges through’ the self¹s struggle to silence it.

3) The impossible and the impossibility of beyond, as two motifs of the novel, are constantly examined. The Unnamable tells us the story of an impossible place named silence’. I would argue that silence is the promise’ that the language of the novel constantly makes, yet is never able to fulfil. Silence (and death) paradoxically motivates language and becomes part of (inside) the language of the text while always pointing to the outside.

Okamuro, Minako

Minako Okamuro is Associate Professor of Theatre and Film Arts at Waseda University, Tokyo. She studied at the Postgraduate School of Waseda University and the University College, Dublin. She has published articles about Beckett in English and Japanese, including "A Cartesian Egg: Alchemy in Beckett's Early Works" in Journal of Beckett Studies, vol.9 no.2, 2000. She has also co-edited Beckett Taizen (All about Beckett) with Yasunari Takahashi et al.

 Alchemical Dances in Beckett's Television and Yeats's A Vision

The influence of William Butler Yeats on Beckett has been a subject of scholarly inquiry, but little light has been shed on alchemy in particular as a dimension of this influence. This paper explores the shadow that Yeats casts on Beckett's works for television in terms of alchemy and dance. First, the movement in Quad can be regarded as a representation of a central idea of alchemy insofar as the four players revolving in the square reflect the four elements circulating in the alchemical process. Yet the question of why Beckett presented alchemical thought in the form of dance-like performance in Quad remains. Two prose pieces by Yeats afford insight: "Rosa Alchemica" in The Secret Rose (1897); and "The Dance of the Four Royal Persons", which appeared in the first edition of A Vision (1925). These pieces contain alchemical dances that are similar in significant respects to the dance-like performance in Quad. It is also noteworthy that Yeats was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and had a profound knowledge of alchemy. Considering moreover the deep interest that Beckett took in his old age, a strong argument emerges for Yeats as a crucial source for Beckett's alchemical thought.

Parrott, Jeremy

Having worked for the British Council in several countries and completed a PhD at the Centre for Beckett Studies in Reading I am now an internet-based antiquarian bookseller (physically based in Hungary), a profession I use to support my ongoing research into Beckett.

 "I often thought of my bees…": the authorial name at work and at play in Samuel Beckett's Molloy

During his ‘frenzy of writing’ in the late 1940s Beckett produced the bulk of the work for which he is best remembered, including Waiting for Godot and his remarkable trilogy of novels — Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. A cursory analysis clearly reveals that whereas in his earlier work character names proliferate, by the end of The Unnamable they have virtually disappeared altogether. It is my contention that Beckett’s entire oeuvre can be seen as enacting the search for a name — the author’s own secret name which, if once discovered, uttered or written, would subsume within it all language and cause the Beckettian word-world to implode. Of course such a project appears not merely highly improbable but quite impossible to realize. Nonetheless, such was the nature of Beckett’s wrestling with his art — always seeking to perform the impossible and forever attempting to fail better. In an 800-word passage towards the end of Molloy, ostensibly on the topic of apiculture, Beckett encrypts his extraordinary onomastic theory and puts it immediately into practice in a quite majestic demonstration. This paper briefly traces the trajectory of self-naming in Beckett before engaging in a a detailed textual analysis and decoding of this key passage, perhaps the most important onomastic manifesto in modern literature. 

Click here for Change all the names! - a virtual exhibition

Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts

 Phillips, James

 I am a recent PhD graduate from the University of Tasmania.

  Beckett's Boredom and the Place of Theory

What is the role of boredom in Beckett's art? Is it still a question of art? How does, for example, a particularly repetitious and mechanical passage in Watt relate to Benjamin's reflections on the aura of art? And how does it relate to Adorno's reflections on the spiritualisation effected by anti-art? Is the frustration of sensual pleasure in a boring passage eased by a meta-interpretation of the passage and is its boredom thereby ignored and its challenge to the pleasurability of art suppressed? Boredom is difficult to face. Heidegger's lengthy analysis of boredom in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics ends up making boredom interesting. For Heidegger, the interest of boredom is regrettable as it prevents boredom's revelation of the truth of time (boredom, Langeweile, is time in its extension, as a "long while", and thus in its difference from the atomistic "nows" of the derivative concept of time). But Heidegger is too critical of voluntarism, for one thing, to advocate giving oneself up to boredom. If there are problems with the theoretical recuperationi of boredom, it still has to be asked - but asked in what sense? - what the boredom in Beckett's text "does".

PICCIONI, LAURA

Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Università degli studi di Urbino, Italia

Corps et identités. Beckett face à la pensée féministe

En tant que lecteur de Malebranche et Geulincx, Beckett sais qu'il faut chercher ce que peut constituer l'intermédiaire effectif entre res extensa et re cogitans. Il abandonne donc les dilemmes métaphysiques de Murphy et les prétentions épistémologiques de Watt et prête attention aux "indications topologiques et anathomiques" qui n'amenent pas à la dissection des organes et des fonctions, mais à la pure étendue et exposition des corps-lieu.

Surtout dans les oeuvres des années '70, Beckett emploie des dispositifs de soustraction et de réduction qui représentent le masculin et le féminin en régime de hypoconnotation et en l'absence d'idéntités substantialisées.

On peut découvrir dans la désarticulation des corps une condition pour les penser et on peut voir aussi dans l' "imperatif anathomique" l'activation d'une spectre de dimensions des corps ainsi que le déploiement d'une 'logique' démarquée de désignations identitaires préconstituées.

La 'mise en scène' de 'sujets' masculins et féminins dévoile une interaction expérimentale et complexe: corporéité/éspace/pratiques de signification et de réitération, qui nous engage à rénouveler le concept d'identité.

La mise en discussion de la dichotomie sujet-objet ("ce clown et son gugusse") peut ouvrir une analitique de phisyonomies de-essentialisées du gender.

On peut donc avancer un'interpretation de quelques texts beckettiens ''croisée' avec des réflexions et hypothèses proposées par les féministes 'post-structuralistes' et 'post-modernes', qui ont privilégié la déconstruction du gender par le moyen aussi de son "extériorisation radicale" (cfr. par exemple la performance dont parle Judith Butler).

Prince, Eric (with Wendy Ishii)

Professor of Theatre, School of the Arts, Colorado State University. Director of a new initiative, the Center for Studies in Beckett and Contemporary Theatre Practice (Hon. President - James Knowlson) Theatre director, playwright, and educator, with a diverse Beckett productions/publications profile including essay-interviews with Sir Peter Hall, Billie Whitelaw, David Warrilow, Antoni Libera, Prunella Scales and Barry McGovern. Author of nine original theatre works, two of which, Wildsea Wildsea (1988) and Kafka's Last Request (1980) received the Sunday Times Playwriting Award. Most recent play Red Roses, written for Bas Bleu Theatre, Fort Collins, Colorado, was also produced by Alan Ayckbourn¹s Stephen Joseph Theatre Company (Summer 2002). In July 1999 gave a unique and foolish solo performance presentation Wildsea Wildsea: Wielopole Wielopole in Tadeusz Kantor¹s country home near Krakow in memory of the Cricot 2 Theatre Company (CONCEPTS). Recent paper ­ Rekindling Embers was presented to the Beckett Working Group at the IFTR/FIRT world congress, Amsterdam, July 2002. Directed Embers along with Come and Go and Footfalls (featuring Wendy Ishii) as Voices From The Dark, a Beckett trilogy, for the Bas Bleu Theatre 2002 season.

 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.

Reader, Stephen

* Zurich, Switzerland, 1950. UK 1958/1962 ff. Visual artist. B.A./UCW, Aberystwyth; MFA, Düsseldorf, where I have lived and worked since 1974. Sculpture and language, including performance, are areas of work. Themes of transition, space, betweens, in inner and outer senses; place, space, presence/absence. Affinities to a Beckettian sense of things became conscious since Œdiscovering¹ his late prose. Text studies under Paul Good at the Academy of Fine Art in Düsseldorf, collaboration on an International S. Beckett Symposium with actors, producers, visual artists, Düsseldorf 1992/3.

Voices

The presentation is a performance which, if it stands, will do so because it is both Œmine¹ and thereby a homage Œd¹après¹. The same goes for the sculpture in the exhibition (B).

Tunings. In place of a Summary

Tentatively, past atrophies to his worlds and Beckett¹s. The matter of a voice, in nebulous circumstances. The ambivalence of growing shuttled between languages and messages. Sounding voices out or just soundings. As in: from the child¹s eye/ear view, all the voices adults adopt and listeners are glued by, almost literally spellbound, to the bafflement of the meanwhile grown child. One¹s own voice missing sense by a mile, the greater the effort of articulation ­ its own trap.

Fragments accrete, in a variety of voices. Moods or perceptions, continuity or sense might emerge in retrospect ­ once the voice dies down. A general 'feel' precipitates. Prague, the flood. Samizdat literature lying surviven in my hand. ­ Václav Havel¹s in an almanac shortly before he was jailed and for whom Beckett wrote Catastrophe, ending visually unsilenced. Sirens. Voices as sound may punctuate the flow - the long braking of a train, or the best I can do for a currawong­ all its songs and still it. Betraying identity implies it is there. But so is the old mime piece with the mask that sticks. Time and none. ŒPlace¹, says Sally Morgan, and none. Presence and (thank you, Sam) lessness.

Sustaining or a relinquishing, to acknowledge past and imperceptible future, ceded up to this place and halfway never give up the illusion of the temporary in this unending stay. Flow and stasis comes the refrein. Should be refrain but mistyping 'frein', if French it's to be, then frein. As long trains brake long, pulling in, they say 'stop' though the brake path seems endless.

Richards, Page

 The University of Hong Kong, Department of English

 To understand classic American texts, as seemingly different as Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle or John Berryman’s "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet," we have to be aware of oral currents of America performance. To understand better those oral rhetorical strategies, we must study Samuel Beckett’s influence on oral practices of written drama. Here I do not refer to well-studied influences of farce or vaudeville. I point specifically, instead, to strategies that make many classic texts more compelling if heard as oral.

Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, for example, offers a way back for hearing, rather than seeing, what is happening in American written texts, texts that attempt to make up in performance what they lacked in an oral tradition. Like Beckett’s play," which, in the spirit of many tall tales, relies on "parody of the joke," early American letters exhibit a "very conscious sense" of writing, according to Robert A. Ferguson, one that I believe continues.

Samuel Beckett is a model for the kinds of rhetorical strategies that are as "complex rhetorically" as they are simple in theme. Presenting these strategies clearly, I will look again at the extraordinary influence and hearing that Beckett makes loud in many otherwise heard-of, but so far unheard, texts.

 Salisbury, Laura

Gagging for it: Peristalsis and Compulsion in Beckett’s Drama

Gags are everywhere in Beckett’s drama. There are hat games (Godot), cat and dog exchanges (Film), lights that switch on and off unpredictably (Rough for Theatre I) and a peculiarly persistent interest in circus props and pratfalls. These routines seem to be just that, games of habit that pass the time whilst showing how the time slowly passes. I will argue, however, that gags are not simply peripheral moments; rather, they function as compulsive interruptions within conventional theatrical narration, describing formal movements that seem to repeat rather than advance. In the nineteenth century, a "gag" was not necessarily comic; it was simply defined as an interruption within a written piece by some extempore play. The theatrical gag is also related to an earlier definition in which a gag is "a ‘made-up’ story; a piece of deception" — a sense which is, in turn, related to the notion of forcibly inducing an audience to "swallow" a story. I will therefore explore the suggestive relationship between these formal comic gags and gags as the objects of repression and torture in Catastrophe and Rough for Radio II. Caught in a peristaltic movement between swallowing and vomiting, theatrical nourishment and impoverishing violence, I will suggest that gagging, like stuttering and trembling, describes and enacts the complex and contradictory compulsion to express and repress that is central to Beckett’s aesthetic and ethical concerns. Gagging is not a marginal effect or simply a way of passing the time; rather, it is a particular way of passing the time that that brings the famous "obligation to express" into a comic converse with violence and desire.

Salvini, Laura

Department of English Language and Literature, university of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy.

"Please, dress'em à la Beckett". Costume design for Beckett's plays in Italy

In my paper I'd like to trace an idea of TIME in Beckett through costume design. I will examine Beckett's own indications about costumes, which are scattered in all his plays, and some biographical elements, in Deirdre Bair's Samuel Beckett. A Biography, which reveal his attitude towards clothing in his everyday life as well as his passion for movie heroes like Buster Keaton or Laurel & Hardy. In my opinion, both elements influenced his indications on his characters' attires. My study of costume design in Beckett's work will then examine some Italian performances, which include the first Finale di Partita/Endgame directed by Andrea Camilleri in 1958, Camilleri's television version of Finale di Partita/Endgame (authorised by Beckett himself) broadcast in 1978 by the Italian public TV, Giorni felici/Oh les beaux jours directed by Giorgio Strehler in 1982. Discussion on these particular performances is also enriched by my conversations with director Andrea Camilleri (who is well known in Italy as number one best-seller author for his detective stories), sculptor Angelo Canevari, who was costume and stage designer for Endgame in 1978, and costume designer Luisa Spinatelli, who worked with Giorgio Strehler. I believe that by underlining some concrete aspects of his theatre this secondary approach to Becktt's work offers a surprising insight of his boundless art.

Saunders, Graham

Graham Saunders is a lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of the West of England (U.K). He is author of the book 'Love me or Kill me': Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (Manchester University Press, 2002 ). He has also contributed articles to the journals Modern Drama and Contemporary Theatre Review.

Sarah Kane and Samuel Beckett

 Arguably Sarah Kane has emerged as the most significant British dramatist to have emerged from the so called 'in-yer face' collection of young writers  who emerged in the mid 1990s. Since her death in February 1999 her plays have been performed throughout the world, and much new critical writing is beginning to emerge which seeks to revaluate the content and shaping influences in her work.

One feature of all her stage plays is the 'gaunt shadow' exerted by Samuel Beckett. This paper examines the various ways Kane draws upon Beckett's drama within her own work.From Blasted ( 1995 ), and its incorporation of the 'psuedo-couple' in the relationship between Ian and Cate, to  certain directly reinterpreted scenes from Endgame and Waiting for Godot; to the use of direct Beckett quotations in Crave ( 1998 ), I hope to demonstrate that an acknowledgement of  Beckett's influence is essential in coming to an understanding of the patterns of dramatic image and language within Kane's drama.

The paper will also examine the formal and stylistic influence of Beckett in her last two plays, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis ( 1999 ) in terms of their use of language and abandonment of formal notions of character and plot. Both plays have also been compared negatively to Beckett in the respect that they draw away from a full engagement with the world - an accusation frequently made about Beckett's later work.

 Scheiner, Corinne

Maytag Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, The Colorado College, USA.

Is Simon Grim Samuel Beckett?; Or, What’s Beckett Doing in Hal Hartley’s Henry Fool?

 As the title indicates, I pursue two lines of inquiry in this paper, both of which examine the powerful influence Samuel Beckett–or, perhaps more accurately, "the myth of Samuel Beckett"–asserts on contemporary storytellers such as the filmmaker Hal Hartley. My first query concerns the plot of Hartley’s 1998 movie, Henry Fool. When asked in an interview with Sony Pictures what inspired him to make the movie, Hartley replied: "I wanted to tell a story about influence, both artistic and personal." Accordingly, the film centers on the relationship between Henry Fool, a drifter, and Simon Grim, a garbage man. Henry, who is writing his "Confessions," befriends Simon and encourages him to write. Simon produces a poem which, after his sister posts it to the internet, brings him worldwide fame.

Artistic influence does not serve merely as the film’s subject, but also appears in the film’s intertextual references to numerous literary works and characters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Perhaps the most obvious of these influences is Mephistopheles, with whom Henry shares numerous attributes. In addition, the very name of the title character suggests John Berryman’s alter ego in The Dream Songs. Finally, the poem that Simon pens appears quite similar to Alan Ginsburg’s "Howl."

Recall, however, that Hartley desired to tell a story about both artistic influence and personal influence. Thus, this film about two writers draws not only on literary works and characters but also on the creators of these works and their lives. The most central and important of these figures, as I argue in this paper, is Beckett. First, the actor who plays Simon–James Urbaniak–bears an uncanny resemblance to the young Beckett. Second, many of Simon’s experiences both as a man–for example, his relationship with his mother–and as a writer–such as, among others, the siege the room, the censure of his work, and the receipt of the Nobel Prize–mirror those of Beckett.

My second query examines the larger issue of the influence Beckett, as writer, exerts on Hartley, as filmmaker; in particular, I explore how Beckett’s influence manifests itself in and comments on Hartley’s choice of a medium. Both Hartley and Beckett tell stories, yet, unlike Beckett, who wrote both non-dramatic (poetry, short stories, and novels) and dramatic (plays and film-scripts) pieces, Hartley works almost exclusively with film (although he has written one "play with music," entitled "Soon"). Thus, I contend that Hartley’s intertextual referencing of Beckett serves to highlight the mutual influence between so-called "high" and "low" forms of art–the written word and the moving image–and to call into question the validity of such a distinction, particularly in the post-modern age.

Schweiger, Hannes

studies in German and English Literature and in German as a Foreign Language at the University of Vienna and at the University College Dublin

MA thesis on the reception of Samuel Beckett in Austria

German teacher in Bamako, Mali in 2000/2001

currently working on a PhD thesis on George Bernard Shaw in the context of Austrian/German modernism versus English modernism with a particular emphasis on Shaw as a socialist

visiting PhD student at the University of Cambridge (German department) in the academic year 2002/2003

research fields: English-German/Austrian relations; modernism; German and Austrian literature in the 19^th and 20^th century.

Samuel Beckett and Friederike Mayröcker - attempts at writing the self

Sellbach, Undine

Undine Sellbach is currently at the Australian National University where she is working on her doctoral thesis about the role of the imagination in Wittgenstein’s work. At the end of 2001 she co-directed and performed in a theatre show entitled The Heart of The Black Sea for the Street Theatre in Canberra. She has also made two video documentaries about the relation between writing and images, one on the Tasmanian writer Margaret Scott and another on the printmaker Udo Sellbach.

 Making Pictures of Philosophy — Wittgenstein and Beckett.

 This paper looks at two ideas that link the early work of Samuel Beckett and the latter work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein describes the metaphysical desire to define concepts as the experience of speaking without having any sense of the role our words actually play in our lives. Marjorie Perloff has compared Wittgenstein’s diagnosis of the ‘context disorder’ characteristic of philosophy to the way Beckett’s characters in Watt seem to grasp the definition of words but have no real sense of how to apply them. What makes it possible to recognize the lives of Beckett’s characters in Wittgenstein’s description of metaphysics? It is not that the two thinkers can be found to share the same philosophical position since Wittgenstein ultimately emphasizes the way we can understand each other by recalling context, where as Beckett gives us little sense that it is always possible to recall the contexts that would enable this understanding. Rather Wittgenstein’s depiction of metaphysics can be found in Beckett’s work because metaphysics, as Wittgenstein describes it, is not a theoretical argument, but a form of life: the everyday desire to evade the contexts that make up our lives. In fact, throughout Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein does not argue with metaphysics as through it were a philosophical position, instead he makes a series of imaginative attempt to illustrate it. Beckett also makes images of philosophical thought or intuitions, in some of his own writing.

In this paper I will look at the significance of the process of illustration for the crossing over of philosophy and literature. Derrida has famously blurred the boundaries between philosophy and literature by emphasizing the play of metaphor within a philosophical text. However this ‘in between’ of philosophy and literature operates in a different way, since it is a process by which one genre tries to envisages another. I will use Wittgenstein and Beckett’s work to look at the importance of this activity for philosophy, and at the new life pictures of philosophy might have in literary texts.

 Sheehan, Paul

Dr. Paul Sheehan teaches part-time at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author of Modernism, Narrative and Humanism (2002), which contains a chapter on Beckett's Trilogy, and editor of Becoming Human: New Perspectives on the Inhuman Condition (forthcoming; 2003). He has also contributed to The Beckett Encyclopedia and the Journal of Beckett Studies, and is a co-founder of the London Beckett Seminar.

Births for Nothing: Beckett's Ontology of Parturition

I begin with its provenance, which I locate in German letters — from the tradition of the Bildungsroman to specific instantiations in Kafka, Heidegger and Georg Trakl. Then I delineate Beckett’s encounter with the idea: the 1935 Jung lecture, often cited as the source of his interest in ‘intrauterine matters’, along with his reading of Otto Rank on birth trauma. The implied difference between being ‘properly’ and ‘improperly’ born is explored through the relevant section in All That Fall and in the brief prose work ‘I Gave Up Before Birth’, with its questioning of natality and agency. Finally, I look at the closing pages of The Unnamable where doors, or thresholds, are evoked, and relate this to the first threshold in Beckett’s indigent ontology, the trauma of birth.

Shields, Paul

 Paul Shields is Assistant Editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies. He has published articles on Beckett’s Endgame and Company and is a contributor to the forthcoming Grove Press Companion to Samuel Beckett. He was a presenter at the Beckett in Berlin 2000 Symposium and chaired a panel on Beckett at the New York Conference on Language and Literature in 2000. He is currently assisting S. E. Gontarski on the publication of Beckett’s correspondence with Barney Rosset.

 Ark-etypal Questing: Beckett’s Mercier and Camier

 In his essay on Mercier and Camier, Eric Levy discusses the similarities between Dante’s Divine Comedy and Beckett’s short novel, focusing on the ways in which the journey of Beckett’s title characters compares and contrasts with Dante’s quest through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise: "It is not so much a case here of Mercier and Camier paralleling or mimicking the Divine Comedy as of the later work being superimposed upon the earlier spiritual voyage" (119). While Levy’s argument is compelling, closer inspection of the entire novel reveals that Beckett’s preoccupation is more likely with an older story of archetypal questing: the biblical account of Noah and the Flood. Indeed, a river of echoes of the Genesis story courses through the book, as Beckett’s highly allusive language and imagery persistently call up the catastrophic deluge. In one respect, the collection of allusions serves to intensify the characters’ ironic lack of shelter from the elements, their unstructured wanderings through torrential and finally unrelenting rains. Yet, more significantly, the allusions link Beckett’s often ignored novel to a series of more studied works–including Endgame and Not I–in which the saga of Noah and the Flood is a central, if latent, intertext.

 Simon, Jane

 Gender Studies Department, University of Sydney

 Samuel Beckett’s Film and sensation.

Samuel Beckett’s 1964 singular piece of film making entitled Film is his only attempt to work with the medium of cinema. In comparison to Beckett’s writing and theatre projects, Film has been paid very little critical attention. Gilles Deleuze has written extensively on Film in The Movement-Image, however in this paper I want to approach Beckett’s film using Deleuze’s idea of sensation in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Although primarily concerned with Francis Bacon’s paintings, The Logic of Sensation makes endless comparisons with figures such as Beckett and offers a model of analysis that doesn’t rely upon the relationship between representation, subjectivity and reality — a division which is problematic for literary and film criticism because it limits analysis to models of response which filter out what might lie beneath or beyond signification, representation and subjectivity.

The idea of sensation described by Deleuze can be loosely defined as an extreme experience of perception — one which speaks directly to the nervous system. This idea of sensation short-circuits models of analysis which mediate between an ‘object’ and a theory. It allows for an approach to texts or bodies on their own terms - what Brian Massumi describes as ‘meeting them halfway’. In approaching Beckett’s Film I want to gesture toward a less structured form of response that is intertwined, or at least, not entirely distanced from the very gestures and materiality of the text itself. Sensation might provide a tool for such an engagement.

Simonsen, Bettina Frank

Country: Denmark

 "What it was all about I had not the slightest idea.": Postmodern anti-detection in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy and Paul Auster’s City of Glas.

That a postmodern writer such as Paul Auster in his New York Trilogy employs elements from the traditional detective narrative in creating what has been termed anti-detective stories is widely acknowledged, but my argument is that in doing so, he is inspired by the narratological experiments of another writer, Samuel Beckett. In my paper, I will focus on the two first novels of chronologically and stylistically disparate trilogies, Molloy and City of Glass, whose polyphone and notoriously unstable detective/writer protagonists foreground a parallel between a classical detectivist code and a hermeneutic reading/writing of the world, and in their ultimate exposure and rejection of both undermine "the detective-like expectations of the positivistic mind" which, according to critic William V. Spanos, is the most immediate task of the postmodern writer. In their play with and parody of elements from the traditional detective narrative, both writers investigate and deconstruct ontological "culprits" such as language, identity and presence, and simultaneously demonstrate the ultimate collapse of a rationalist worldview.

I am in my paper going to touch on literary detection’s inherent potential for its own destruction, and its consequential appeal to a postmodern imagination. Finally, I discuss whether Molloy and City of Glass, by challenging and parodying elements from a traditional genre, do not simultaneously re-instate and confirm these.

Smith, Russell

 Russell Smith wrote his PhD on Samuel Beckett and the author-function in literary and cultural theory. He has published articles in Southern Review and the Journal of Beckett Studies, and teaches in literary and cultural studies at the University of Adelaide. He also writes regularly on contemporary visual arts.

 Silence and Repetition: Beckett's Endlessness

"My life, my life, now I speak of it as something over, now as of a joke which still goes on, and it is neither, for at the same time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that?"

The rhetoric of ending runs throughout Beckett's work, which as a whole can be seen in terms of the problematic of The Unnamable, as a series of failed attempts to say the last word, a series of renewed attempts "to end yet again". For a writer who once described his ambition as "to leave a stain upon the silence", the resumption of that silence in the ending of a work is an intensely problematic undertaking.

This paper is a study of Beckett's endings, and of the theme of ending which runs through the works. In many ways, Beckettian temporality is a state of perpetual deferral, a recapitulation of the motto "I can't go on, I'll go on". For us now, however, reading Beckett will always mean re-reading, a process of repetition perpetually in danger of becoming Habit. To what extent does Beckett's work deny its own ending, condemning its readers to endless repetition?

 Stewart, Paul

 I am an Assistant Professor of Languages at Intercollege, Nicosia, Cyprus. Since completing my Ph.D. on Beckett and disjunction at The University of Bristol, U.K., I have regularly contributed to conferences and published three articles on Beckett (including "The Need for Beckett" in the current Journal of Beckett Studies). My research is currently concerned with the influence of Beckett on literary theorists and postmodern practitioners.

 "…all men talk, when talk they must, the same tripe." Derrida, Beckett and Needle Wylie.

This paper considers paradigms of intertextual relations between Beckett and Derrida through the prism of Murphy.

In Derrida’s "Sauf le Nom" the similarity between deconstruction and negative theology is expressed. Absent from the essay, but equally comparable using the terms of Derrida’s discussion, is Beckett’s The Unnamable. Accounting for this congruence one might follow Richard Begam’s work on "Tympan" and suggest a form of occult marginalium, or one might follow Uhlmann and Deleuze and suggest texts encountering the same problem-field through a shared non-discursive experience.

Wylie’s assertion that all men talk the same tripe "once a certain degree of insight has been reached" does not question the validity of these two paradigms of intertextual relation, yet it does question the value of those relations, making them inevitable as if the "quantum" of the intellectual "wantum", to adopt Wylie’s phrase, cannot vary. This valueless (and hence non-judgemental) relation acts as an escape into a non-agonistic form of influence, and turns progress into repetition which can only be short-circuited by denying the imperative and choosing not to talk at all.

 SULTAN, SABBAR SAADOON

 Assistant Prof. and Head of the Dept. of English,AI-ISRA UNIVERSITY,AMMAN,JORDAN. Published the folowing articles

• Beckett's Trilogy: A Preliminary View,AALEM ALFIKR (Kuwait),Sept.1985
• Riders to the Sea: The Drama of Life and Death,Al BAYAN (Kuwait),Oct.1989.
• Shaffer's Ritual Drama, AL MASRAH,March,1997 CAIRO,EGYPT.
• The Academic Novel, Kitabat Muasirah, Beirut,2000
• The Critical and Creative Cotroversy,Journal of Irbid University ,Jordan 2001
• The Poet and the Critic in Nabokov's PALE FIRE,Al_Zarka University,Jordan,2001.
• The Image of the Critic in Fiction, due to be published in YARMOUK UNIVERSITY JOURNAL,2003.
• Golding's THE INHERITORS AND THE PURSUIT OF FORM, in progress.
• Translated the following books into Arabic:
• Peter Munz, When the Golden Bough Breaks,1986.
• The Situation of Criticism: from New Criticism to Structuralism,1990.
• A.C.Apter,Fantasy Literature,1990.
• William Righter,Myth and Literature,1992.

 THE CRITICAL ASPECTS OF BECKETT'S TRILOGY

Beckett's name is often associated with the theatre of the absurd and literature of "exhaustion" and silence.However he has shown a remarkable interest in the controversy of criticism and literary theory.Suffice to mention his" Dante..Bruno.Vico..Joyce"(1929) and PROUST AND THREE DIALOGUES WITHGEORGES DUTHUIT(1949). In these his criticalinsights about time and philosophy are self_evident.

The present paper is an attempt to view his trilogy (Molloy,Malone Dies,The Unnamable) from this perspective.It consists of two sections. The first is concerned with the critical views explicitly stated throughout

the trilogy, particularly those thet tackle the issues of the self, language and philosophy.

The second section elaborates Beckett's concept of the narrator-narrated and assesses his success in presenting narrators whose very existence and identity are questionable but their tales are convincing

enough. It is indeed Beckett'lesson of narration and perhaps justification and defenceof his scorn of "the vulgarity of plausible concatenation"

Summers-Bremner, Eluned

 University of Auckland New Zealand

 "Nothing to be done": Unnamable sinthôme, or, the Insomniac’s Beckett

My paper pursues in Beckett¹s work, particularly the trilogy that ends with The Unnamable, an insomniac logic whereby the assumed order of things according to which night, and sleep, bind us to the day and their companions light, knowledge, work, and daily custom, is repeatedly startled into wakefulness. Insomnia opens the world to its absence from itself, to the void in language that, as Christian Prigent says in relation to Beckett, "makes community intolerable" but that nonetheless "gives it the elasticity, the porosity, without which [it] becomes . . . panoptic, carceral," terrorising ("A Descent from Clowns," 77). The insomniac¹s paradoxical predicament, the search for a passivity in which s/he does not believe, an anxious capitulation to the day/night laws governing public speech and private dreaming, characterises Beckett¹s own sinthômatic or arduously homeless pact with language, to use Lacanian terms. In The Unnamable speaking is a rending of language that refuses support in a fiction of the sleeping or civilised body but equally refuses to validate a dream of madness, to valourise the night. In this way Beckett opens language to its insomnia or simultaneous dependence on, and fear of, night, and to the radically cohabitative yet mutually estranging labour of sleeping, waking and dreaming.

 Tajiri, Yoshiki

 Yoshiki Tajiri holds an M.A. in English from the University of Tokyo and University of London. He is currently writing a Ph.D. thesis on "Beckett and the prosthetic body," to be submitted to the University of London. He is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tokyo. His main research areas are Beckett, modernism and theory. He is translator of Dream of Fair to Middling Women into Japanese (1995) and coeditor of Beckett A to Z (1999).

 The World Enwombed: Beckett and Yumeno Kyusaku

Obsession with the womb is a conspicuous feature of Beckett’s work. He himself admitted that he had memories of the intrauterine period, in which he was painfully confined and deprived of mobility. It was an important factor in the psychoanalytic treatment he went through with Bion. Phil Baker illuminates this aspect of Beckett’s work by relating it to the context in which many artists of the 1930s talked about the obsession with the womb under the influence of psychoanalysis, particularly Otto Ranks’ significant book, The Trauma of Birth. In this paper, I aim to discuss how the womb obsession profoundly underlies the sense of being and thus creates "the world enwombed" in Beckett’s work. In the process I compare Beckett to the Japanese avant-garde novelist Yumeno Kyusaku (1889-1936), whose masterpiece Dogura-Magura (1935) is also significantly inscribed with a similar vision of "the world enwombed." Such a comparison reveals some peculiarities of Japanese avant-garde art.

 Mariko Hori Tanaka

 Mariko Hori Tanaka is Professor of English Language and Drama Studies at Aoyama Gakuin University. She has published several critical essays on Samuel Beckett, including "Special Features of Beckett Performances in Japan" in Lois Oppenheim and Marius Buning, eds., Beckett On and On..., "Postmodern Staging of Waiting for Godot" and "Elements of Haiku in Beckett" in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourdﾕhui, and co-edited Yasunari Takahashi et al, Beckett Taizen (Beckett A to Z). She has also published numerous critical essays on contemporary British and American playwrights, and translated quite a few plays for professional companies in Japan, British and American plays for Japanese productions, and Japanese plays for overseas productions.

 The Body in the Adaptation of Rockaby into Butoh Dance

Beckett’s affiliation with sport and dance is inferred from Lucky’s speech and his dance in Waiting for Godot, though they are treated in a parodic way. When Beckett required ballet-like movements of his actors in directing the play or favored ballet dancers for playing Quad, the emphasis was on postures, forms or stylization in movements rather than on the beauty of the well-proportioned bodies of dancers. Characters in Beckett’s work tend to have "the defective or otherwise deviant body" (Connor), which is often hidden in the darkness or covered with drapery. Beckett took every meticulous care in writing and directing the bodily movements and gestures of his characters/actors, as a conductor would do with his orchestra, such that "harmony" in Beckett’s work arises from the rhythms of their physical movements as well as other elements of theatre language, such as light, space, sound, and music. Dance elements play an important role in Beckett’s work. The author, however, did not explore the realm of dance as he did that of music. It was other artists inspired by his work who chose dancers to play his characters. From the point of view of faithfulness to the original, such adaptations may not be called Beckett’s work. These artists’ approaches to Beckett, however, reflect their own artistic exploration of a subconscious arena involving the human body, in such a way that, I believe, unique aspects of the physical and the corporeal in Beckett may be revealed through their interpretations. This paper aims at examining the way the Beckettian body is interpreted by the Japanese body of Kazuo Ohno, a Butoh dancer who performed Rockaby in 1998.

 Thériault, Michèle

 Michèle Thériault is an independent curator, writer and editor living in Montreal. She is also a lecturer in contemporary art and museology.

D'après le dépeupleur/after the lostones: Unravelling spatial realms

This paper will examine the nature of spatial realms in relation to an exhibition that was conceived and curated using Beckett’s Le Dépeupleur/The Lost Ones as a point of departure. Questions of visuality, sensoriality, corporeality and of virtual environments in Le Dépeupleur/The Lost Ones make it relevant to issues in contemporary art. The problematic of the confrontation and layering of differently inflected spatial realms arises as areas in the gallery come to be dedicated to certain functions (displays of works of art, of documentation, of photos and of wall texts), as the works come to occupy and exist in the exhibition space, and as the visitor makes his or her way in the space. The untranslatable nature of Le Dépeupleur\The Lost Ones and the ensuing paradoxical underpinnings of this curatorial and artistic project lead to a singular coexistence of the space of the text and story with the space of the work(s), documents and of the overall exhibition. A coexistence that defines itself through spatial dislocations. This paper will explore these dislocations through an analysis of the text in relation to the exhibition space and the works.

Visuals will accompany the presentation. (A video and possibly slides)

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

Dr Stephen Thomson is Lecturer in English at the University of Reading. He is currently working on a monograph on science narrative. He is the author of a number of articles on literary and critical theory, among which, 'What is Queer Theory Doing with the Child?', (Parallax 2001), co-authored with Karín Lesnik-Oberstein; 'Sleepwalking into Modernity: Bourdieu and the Case of Ernest Dowson' (Criticism, Fall 1999); 'The Adjective, My Daughter: Staging T.S. Eliot's 'Marina'' (Yearbook of English Studies 2002). 'Authentic Voices, Substitute Communities: The Organic Writing of the Child' in Children in Culture ed. by Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (Macmillan, 1998).

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.

Van Hulle, Dirk

University of Antwerp Belgium

 Nonetheless: The Textual Genesis of ‘Stirrings Still’

 Toward the end of his life, having said ‘nohow on’ in Worstward Ho, Samuel Beckett went on nonetheless, albeit hesitantly. This hesitancy characterizes the genesis of his next text, Stirrings Still, which started as an attempt ‘to tell his end’ almost simultaneously in French and in English (MSS 2933/1/1-2). It took Beckett almost five years to complete this text of only a few pages. That this complex writing process led to the text as it is published only seems an inevitable course in retrospect. The examination of the labyrinth of manuscripts, including the bifurcations and dead ends, shows that the hesitation in the writing process is more than a mere textual curiosity; it goes to the heart of Beckett’s poetics of process, which is comparable to the poetics of his French contemporary Francis Ponge. Beckett’s decision to ‘fail as no other dare fail’ taken shortly after the Second World War almost coincides with his French colleague’s decision to publish his ‘échecs de description’. The Pongean idea of ‘relative perfection’ and the tension between writing and written, stirring and still, remains present in the finished product, for the ‘fixed’ published text of Stirrings Still continues to stir nonetheless. It was not only followed by the French translation Soubresauts, it also generated ‘the next next to nothing’ since the words ‘comment dire’ in the first manuscript of Stirrings Still (MS 2933/1/1) became the title of the next text Comment dire. The genetic study of Stirrings Still thus shows that writing about the end proved to be an excellent way to delay it.

Venning, Juliana

Country: New Zealand

Links between Popper and Beckett and Chinese philosophers in/of Language?

Beckett¹s language is spare, demanding, full of linked meanings, double entendres ‹ being in more than one hearing/language genus as well as in the sense of moods and modes. Linking Beckett the writer with Beckett the man of the world, Beckett who conversed and wrote in carefully-crafted pictures of sounds and voices with Popper is essential for me as they both sought to elucidate Œtruths¹ by examining and when necessary rejecting apparent meanings.

Popper researches by a process of examining whether a belief/scientific principle is able to be falsified or held as a possible verisimilitude! He does so looking into the use of symbols and what is beneath them, able to be created from and extrapolated from them.

A particular seventeenth century Chinese philosopher who became an artist used symbols as a language in his painting when politics and his genealogy effectively silenced his vocal chords to all but laughter. He chose to use two names as well to Œillustrate his past life and his present Chu Ta and Pa Ta Shan Jen.

My points will be elucidated using slides of the latter philosopher¹s work and overheads referencing excerpts from Beckett¹s and Popper¹s works.

Walker, Brenda

Brenda Walker is a novelist and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Western Australia. She wrote her PhD thesis on parody in Beckett's fiction. Her most recent novel is Poe's Cat.  

WILLIAMS, PETER A.

 Honorary Research Associate, Department of English, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia.

 LEAVING OUT: GESTURE AND THE SUBLIME IN BECKETT’S MINIMAL TEXTS

In his later stories (Company; ill seen ill said) and short plays (Not I, Breath), Beckett concentrates on an epistemological project that John Ashbery calls "leaving out." Employing what I call ‘representational subtraction’ and what he calls ‘impotence,’ Beckett suspends the magnetism of ‘meaning’ and ‘understanding’ in order to position mimetic language as less powerful than phenomenalism. Subtraction and impotence are then not only sublimely negative categories for a postmodernist aesthetic of surfaces, but they also provide the basis for a positive critique of the power of mimetic language to substitute for things, and of the conventions that preside over that substitution. This critique marks the difference between thematisation and dramatisation or gesture: Beckett dramatises embodiment by fragmenting and breaking his grammar and syntax. His "midget" grammar then works as an inverted analogue for a re-awakened sense of our own embodiment and presence in the phenomenal world. Beckett casts this grammar as "unsaying" - a concern that Emmanuel Levinas defines more generally as "the attachment of thought to being." According to Levinas, these subtractions are "a form of the said that breaks with the categories of discourse" and they represent an impenetrability in which the Beckettian text takes on valencies of meaning that range from everything to nothing. This violence to a reader’s hermeneutical prowess causes excesses of indeterminate signification to create the conditions for a sublime aesthetic that is distinctly particular because the consensual grounds necessary for aesthetic judgement are themselves a sublime sentiment which resists a totalising aesthetic. Gestures express those excesses of signification that have been pushed down into the nerve nets of physical embodiment in forms that are both singular and communal: singular in their ability to express one’s response to the incomprehensibility of Beckett’s texts in an immediate and idiosyncratic way, and communal in their possibilities for embodying an aesthetic language that is unspoken, thereby losing the need for common language rules or even the assumed, consensual grounds upon which languages are built.

Willits, Curt

 Having taught abroad for several years and worked as an editorial assistant for the Journal of Beckett Studies, Curt Willits is currently working with S. E. Gontarski on a forthcoming book, Samuel Beckett and the End(s) of Man: A Blanchovian Reading.

How It Is: The Epical Call to Voice at the Limits of Experience

Applying the Blanchovian "situation of the writer" to the post- Malone Dies novels opens interpretation otherwise overlooked. For Blanchot, the writer becomes the witless recorder of a dispossessed script of subjectivity dispossessed, ill-transcribing a vertiginous, soundless "voice," dissimulated by the very words that give it "life."

The voice that cannot be heard and a subject-less--yet still (although barely) human--scribe: these two Blanchovian literary figures are the subject for my reading of Beckett's How It Is. This study proposes that although remaining failingly committed Blanchot and Beckett's exigent demands for a nonrelational language,How It Is may be read (as may The Unnamable) as a parody of Blanchot's primal scene of the writer. Therefore, in analyzing a script that is presumedly an imperceptible, unrelizable speech uttered by no one to no one, our discussion initially focuses upon the conundrum of narration. In addition, this paper explores how "light" suggests the involuntary, yet compulsory, mnemonic and imaginative faculties of the demented witness/writer (a coding traceable to The Unnamable). And vital to our inquiry is the "coupling" in "part two" of How It Is, disclosed as the linguistically tormented limit-experience between self and unself, human and inhuman, toward "neither" (using as our model Deleuze and Guattari's stratified "Body without Organs").

Winet, Evan

Evan Winet writes and lectures extensively on modern and contemporary Indonesian theatre and performing objects. His article, "Puppets in the Proscenium: Problems in Indonesian Theatre Historiography" will appear in Re/Writing National Theatre Histories (Iowa University Press,2003). He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at Cornell University. He is also a freelance theatre director and maskmaker.

Menunggu (Waiting) The First Indonesian Godot

 In the 1950s and 1960s, while Sukarno’s Ministry of Culture erected museums to native traditions and grand monuments to the Revolution, much of the Indonesian literati (including the leaders of the modern theatre) looked to the existentialism of Camus and Sartre to carry the insights of Javanese ascetic mysticism into the chaotic freedom of post-colonial identity.

W.S. Rendra’s 1969 production of Waiting for Godot introduced Beckett to Indonesian audiences, suggesting new possibilities in native playwriting, staging and acting which would carry the mystic existentialism of the previous decades into Suharto’s New Order. Rendra "confronted" Godot, eschewing literal translation for a colloquial Malay accessible to all strata of Indonesian society and adapting Beckett’s vaudevillian slapstick to Javanese clowning.

In a young nation struggling between traditional authority and democracy (and in the world’s most populous Islamic nation where millions waited for Allah to intercede) Rendra’s Godot presented imagery both universal and intimate of humanity living at the edge of hope, sufficiently abstract to bypass the censors and yet as meaningful to Indonesia’s students, workers and villagers as to the inmates at San Quentin or the people of Sarajevo.

 Wright, Iain

Iain Wright (MA (Cambridge), Life Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge) is Professor of English at the Australian National University. Shakespeare; Victorian and modern literature; contemporary literary and cultural theory (especially hermeneutics); literature and film; Russian literature; Scottish literature. Publications include articles on Leavis, Beckett, Solzhenitzyn, Raymond Williams, the Elizabethan stage, post-structuralism and history, New Historicism, and forthcoming books on Shakespeare and James I, and on hermeneutics. Former editor of The Cambridge Review

Deconstructing Beckett Deconstructing

Twenty years ago, exasperated by the cruder versions of the 'Death of the Author' rhetoric which were then in fashion, I argued that "What we need to do is not to abolish the author but, precisely, to deconstruct him or her, to refuse the idea - paradoxically offered to us both by the 'traditionalists' and by the post-structuralists - that the word 'author' designates a simple unity. Once replace the notion of the author as 'univocal' - and Beckett above all modern authors ought to help us to do that - by one of the author as a space of contradictions, the site of an articulation of unresolved problematics, the nexus of clashing codes, and most of the force goes out of the fashionable anti-authorial rhetoric."*

Accordingly, I attempted "to clear the ground for a reading of Beckett's texts which might employ some of the strategies of the new critical discourse, the discourse of decentring, while rejecting the exaggerated vendetta against the author which has got muddled up with it." I portrayed Beckett - in the trilogy for instance - masquerading as a cunning deconstructionist, inventing a set of cunning deconstructionist narrators in order to expose the limitations of deconstructionism avant la lettre.

Does such an approach retain any relevance two decades on? The main targets of my 1982 polemic - doctrinaire versions of deconstructionism and Death of the Author sloganising - have long since joined the dodo, but what of other forms of post-structuralism and postmodernism? Can we use Beckett's texts to illuminate and critique and, yes, deconstruct them too? Is there no end to the man's prolepsis?

* '"What matter who's speaking?": Beckett, the authorial subject and contemporary critical theory', in E S Shaffer (ed.), Comparative Criticism, 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)

 Yarmahmoudi, Mostafa

 Mostafa Yarmahmoudi is currently a Ph.D. Performing Arts student at Brunel University, London, UK. He has an M.A in Theatre acting & directing (Tarbiat Modarres Univ. Iran). He has taught Directing, Scriptwriting and Photography at colleges of Tehran Univ., Alzahra Univ. Sound and Vision (I.R.I.B), He has produced, directed and written for television in Iran.

 "Waiting for Godot" is a mirror in front of Capitalism $ Imperialism!

 Beckett’s works are still alive not only for now but also for the future. Especially, "Waiting for Godot" which gave expression to a post-war sense of disorientation and disquiet that the distance of half a century has not subdued. This paper will offer a new analysis, which will critique traditional notions of Beckett’s Nihilism and explore the play’s relevance and voice for now and the future in the light of current globalisation. This "now" and that "future" will be explored from the point of view of a non-western, Asian, specifically an Iranian artist. This view refer to the post-war circumstances which the superpowers have made a tragicomedy, which describes Man’s status after the war and in his/her future as well which makes us not only laugh at the important power in the west but also cry for the poor peoples.

The name "Godot" invites us to measure a play by two widely different yardsticks. Who is "Godot"? Is he/she a survivor? Is it the voice of all suffering humanity or of Western peoples? Does "Godot" have any message today for non-western people? If so, what is it?

Yeoh, Gilbert

Department of English Language and Literature National University of Singapore

 J. M. Coetzee and the Uses of Beckett

The presence of Beckett in the novels of Coetzee is so pervasive that it would seem that Beckett continues to "go on" in Coetzee’s texts. In work after work produced by Coetzee, right up to the recent autobiographical Youth (2002), Beckett’s poetics continue to be central the conception of Coetzee’s texts.

The Beckett texts that have bearing on Coetzee’s writing are Watt and the Molloy trilogy. Coetzee’s ties with Beckett are most visibly established through his ubiquitous references and allusions to the trilogy. An obvious example is the tramp motif that appears in almost all of Coetzee’s novels. The trilogy’s monologic and solipsistic narrative mode is used in all of Coetzee’s works. Many of Coetzee’s works–Life & Times of Michael K, Disgrace, Youth–conclude intriguingly in various distinct Beckettian modes (for instance, dispossession and diminishment).

At subtler, less ostensible levels, Becektt’s poetics inform many of the fundamental premises of Coetzee’s writing. To outline a few: Beckett’s well-known aesthetics of nothing–the situation of him who has nothing to express, no power to express, yet is obliged to express--offers a mirror for Coetzee’s personal situation as a white writer in South Africa who has nothing to express, feels disqualified from writing yet has the moral obligation to express. Beckett’s self in its various negative and minimal dimensions informs Coetzee’s conception of the self as blind, ignorant, stupid and unteachable. Beckett’s concept of an art of failure and nothing informs Coetzee’s formulation of an ethics of relinquishment and dispossession that he sets against the impulse to master and colonize.

Coetzee has engaged so intently and variously with the trilogy that, read at this level, his novels are reflections of the multiple uses of Becektt’s poetics. It is almost as if Coetzee’s texts were a demonstration of the "101 things" one can do with a Beckett text. In my paper, I will first offer some discussion of the "things" that Coetzee does with the Beckett text. I hope to give a sense of the conclusion Coetzee’s implies--for him, the almost inexhaustible uses of the Beckett text. I will then focus on Coetzee’s sixth novel, Age of Iron (1990), to show how Beckett’s conception of a writing of nothing is central to the conception of this novel. In Age of Iron, Coetzee again makes Beckett’s poetics pivotal and the novel is his subtle attempt to write, on his terms, a text of nothing.