Chit for Chat: Part Three, An Exchange (2025)

Conference Report: "Samuel Beckett and World Literature", 4 to 5 May 2016

Report of the 'Samuel Beckett and World Literature' held at the University of Kent on 4 and 5 May 2016.

Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives

The Yearbook of English Studies, 1987

This collection of original essays has been assembled to honor Samuel Beckett on his seventy-fifth birthday -a celebration to which the writer himself has made his own contribution in the form of a play especially written for the occasion and entitled Ohio Im promptu. This special piece appears in an appendix to the volume, where it has been reproduced, through a combination of photo graphic facsimile and textual transcription, in various versions through which it evolved to its final form. Samuel Beckett -the Irishman who lives permanently in France and writes primarily in French (though he translates everything he writes into either English or French, depend ing on the original language of composition) -has achieved fame throughout the world for his work in fiction, drama, and film. A particularly multicultural writer, Beckett's in tellectual interests are so broad and so di verse that his writings in all media are best approached from a variety of disciplines; and this is the approach adopted by the editors of this collection. They have included, not only detailed treatments of literary matters, but also close examinations of such topics as, among others, Beckett's theater in perfor mance, the philosophical traditions against which he writes, his sense of history and politics, his close relation with the visual arts, the complex uses to which his language is put, and his effort to write "without style." The result is a series of critical essays that come close to being the measure of the man and the artist they honor-the writer found particularly congenial to the modern sensibil ity as one in whose work the illusions and deceptions of the outer world resist each sys tem that attempts a faithful, comprehensive, and coherent account, and that, in the end, must inevitably collapse under too great a

Out of the Dark: Samuel Beckett and BBC Radio

The article addresses the BBC radio broadcasts of Beckett's work including drama written for radio, novels and two of his stage plays. It is an introductory survey of Beckett and radio from the perspective of radio scholarship.

Samuel Beckett and posthuman spaces

Textual Practice, 2024

The following is a transcript of an interview conducted by Dr Asijit Datta (SRM University-AP, India) of Prof Jonathan Boulter (Western University, Canada) for a webinar called ‘Samuel Beckett, Spectres and Posthuman Spaces’ that was held over Zoom on November 27, 2020. This interview between two Beckett scholars is an attempt to locate the positions and meanings of the aspects of home/ space/refuge for the abandoned, destitute characters in the works of Samuel Beckett. Beckett’s homeless wanderers are in the condition of the neither, a space that is only motion without direction. Beckett’s physical reduction of his characters and their necessary expulsion from home are explored through the lens of Heidegger’s notion of ‘thrownness’ or Geworfenheit. ‘Thrownness’ precedes the idea of homelessness and is the precondition of being. For Heidegger, in a reductive way, directionality and disseverance characterize the human, but the Beckettian moments of movement and walking, without purpose, are absent from Heidegger. Beckett tends to point towards the origin of the subject without a ground or all necessary groundedness. The colloquy concludes with a discussion concerning the condition of the posthuman in Beckett. To face the Beckettian posthuman is to confront a discursive posthumanity.

The Empty Too : language and philosophy in the works of Samuel Beckett

My book on the works of Beckett.

Beckett and BBC Radio Revisited

Proofs for chapter in Nixon and Pilling, eds., 'On in their company: essays on Beckett, with tributes and sketches; presented to Jim Knowlson on his 80th Birthday' (Whiteknights Press, 2015)

Introduction: Samuel Beckett and the Nonhuman

Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, 2020

Jonathan Boulter, Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett's Short Prose

Journal of Beckett Studies, 2021

The question, in Beckett's writing, of the subject, the body, speech, language, the world-in short, of what constitutes the human-is, for scholars, not exactly new. However, as Jonathan Boulter points out at the outset of Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett's Short Prose, 'posthumanism' is a somewhat recent addition to Beckett scholarship. Given this-in addition to the problematisation of the above categories-it is tempting to attribute to Beckett a sort of nihilism, a destruction of the human subject. Boulter convincingly shows, however, that this would be to speak in haste; Beckett's prose, rather than simply emptying or otherwise absenting the subject, is a critique of the subject in the true sense of the term: an analysis of the component elements of the human, an attempt to understand its context (ecological or social), an attempt to come to terms with the complexities of the subject's place in the world. (2) The founding suggestion of this text, then, is that some of Beckett's short works in particular articulate a certain version

Introduction to SBT/A issue on Samuel Beckett and Extensions of the Mind

SBT/A 29.1 pp. 1-8

Beckett and Avikunthak: Lineages of the Avant-Garde

Frontiers of South Asian Culture: Nation, Trans-Nation and Beyond. Edited by Parichay Patra and Amitendu Bhattacharya, 2023

Being, Seeing, Waiting, Churning. I attempt here to think about a set of avant- garde inheritances and progeny floating in the penumbra around and between Samuel Beckett and Ashish Avikunthak, a generation and nations apart. I will begin by looking at the only film Beckett wrote and conceived, Film (1965), which he said was about ‘perceiving’; Beckett’s avant-gardism may be strung upon his ‘Fail again. Fail better’ maxim: silence or babble, rather than speech, makes for ‘better’ communication, as does not setting eye on eye. In Film, Keaton was directed never to look at the camera. His tasks were to cover up the seeing eye and not see/be seen. In Beckett’s well-known literary text, Waiting for Godot, his protagonists wait for the one who cannot be seen. It is likely that they will fail to see Godot; their waiting will be better for this failure, as it will never be fulfilled. If Film is an avant-garde masterpiece in moving images, Waiting for Godot is its literary equivalent: both are about perceiving and being perceived, and the failure of both. Ashish Avikunthak has brought Beckettian avant-gardism to Bengali cinema in two film adaptations: a short, Antaral (End Note, 2005) based on Beckett’s one-act play, Come and Go, and a feature, Kalkimanthankatha (The Churning of Kalki, 2015), based on Waiting for Godot. Both explore waiting, and watching, and the ruptures as well as fleeting raptures of perception and communication, doomed to fail, perhaps to ‘fail better’. Does Avikunthak’s cinematic engagement with the literary Beckett signify a ‘transnational’ churning of the avant-garde, like the one across generations and nations that Beckett himself had initiated with his Film? Does the avant-garde travel well, or does it ‘fail better’?