SAMUEL BECKETT SUMMER SCHOOL 2015
Good. I am alone. It is summer. Time passes.
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A competitive bursary is available for an Emory Graduate Student to attend the 2015 Samuel Beckett
Summer School. One partnership bursary is available to Emory Graduate Students. It waives the cost of registration, €500.
To be eligible to apply for this bursary, entrants must be engaged in full or part-time postgraduate studies. Interested applicants
are asked to email info@beckettsummerschool.com to acquire a general summer school application form, and then send back to
that address the completed application form, accompanied by a letter of recommendation and a short essay (max 500 words)
outlining their interest or current studies in the work of Samuel Beckett, with a copy to Lois Overbeck, Laney School of Graduate
Studies, Emory University: email lois.overbeck@emory.edu, and to Sam Slote, Associate Professor, School of English, Trinity
College Dublin: email SLOTES@tcd. ie. To qualify for consideration , you must apply to the Summer School and complete other
requirements before 15 March 2015.
Applications for the fifth annual Samuel Beckett Summer School are now open. Please visit our Registration Page for
details on how to apply. The dates for the 2015 Beckett Summer School are Sunday 9th August to Friday 14th August
(arrive on 9th, depart on 15th). The closing date for registration is 4th May 2015.
Speakers:
C. J. Ackerley
is head of the Department of English at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He has published annotated guides to
Malcolm Cowley’s Under the Volcano and Samuel Beckett’s first published novel, Murphy.
Amanda Dennis
earned her PhD from Berkeley, where she focused on Beckett’s relationship to 20 th century French philosophy. Her current
book project, Bodying Space: Beckett and the Question of Agency is a study of Merleau-Ponty and Beckett that
traces theories of embodied agency in Beckett’s prose, theater and television work. She has published on modernism,
Nietzsche and aesthetics, and an article on sensory poetics in Beckett’s Watt will appear this winter in The Journal of
Modern Literature. She has taught in England, France, Spain and the US and is currently a visiting scholar at Columbia
University in New York.
Jonathan Heron
is the Artistic Director of Fail Better Productions and IATL Senior Teaching Fellow at the University of Warwick. His
recent work as a theatre director has included Diary of a Madman/Discords (Warwick Arts Centre), The
Nativity (Pegasus Oxford), Stasis: Beckett Shorts (Oxford Playhouse) and Play without a Title (Belgrade Coventry).
Jonathan is a co-author of Open-space Learning: A Study in Transdisciplinary Pedagogy (Bloomsbury, 2011) and
a contributor to Performing Early Modern Drama Today (CUP, 2012). He has co-edited a special edition of
the Journal of Beckett Studies (23.1, 2014) with Nicholas Johnson, with whom he also co-facilitates the Samuel Beckett
Laboratory. He is a founding member of the AHRC Beckett and Brain Science working group and a co-convenor of the
IFTR Performance-as-Research working group.
Nicholas Johnson
is Assistant Professor in Drama at TCD, as well as a performer, director, and writer. Recent practice-based research
projects on Beckett include Abstract Machines: The Televisual Beckett (ATRL, 2010) and Three Dialogues (ATRL,
2011). In 2012 he directed Ethica: Four Shorts by Samuel Beckett, presenting Play, Come and Go, Catastrophe,
and What Where in Bulgaria, Dublin, the Enniskillen Festival 2013, and Áras an Uachtairáin for World Human Rights
Day. He has contributed to The Plays of Samuel Beckett (Methuen, 2013) as well as Theatre Research
International, the Journal of Art Historiography, and Forum Modernes Theater, and has co-edited the Journal of
Beckett Studies special issue on performance (23.1, 2014) with Jonathan Heron. In 2014 he adapted and directed The
Brothers Karamazov and translated and directed Ernst Toller’s Machinewreckers, both at the Samuel Beckett
Theatre. He is director of Painted Filly Theatre, co-director of the Beckett Summer School, and co-convenor of the Samuel
Beckett Working Group for IFTR.
Mark Nixon
is Associate Professor in Modern Literature at the University of Reading, where he is also Director of the Beckett
International Foundation. With Dirk Van Hulle, he is editor in chief of the Journal of Beckett Studies and Co-Director of
the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. He is also an editor of Samuel Beckett Today /Aujourd’hui and the current
President of the Samuel Beckett Society. He has published widely on Beckett’s work; recent books include the monograph
Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936-37 (Continuum, 2011), the edited collection Publishing Samuel Beckett (British
Library, 2011) and Samuel Beckett’s Library, written with Dirk Van Hulle (Cambridge UP, 2013). His critical edition of
Beckett’s short story Echo’s Bones was published by Faber in April 2014. He is currently preparing critical editions of
Beckett’s Critical Writings (with David Tucker; Faber) and Beckett’s German Diaries’(with Oliver Lubrich; Suhrkamp),
as well as The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature (with Ulrika Maude; Bloomsbury, 2015).
Lois Oppenheim
is University Distinguished Scholar, Professor of French, and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and
Literatures at Montclair State University. She is also Scholar Associate Member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society
and Institute and Honorary Member of the William Alanson White Society. Dr. Oppenheim has published more than 90
papers and authored or edited twelve books, the most recent being Psychoanalysis and the Artistic Endeavor:
Conversations with Literary and Visual Artists; Imagination from Fantasy to Delusion (awarded the 2013
Courage to Dream Prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association), and A Curious Intimacy: Art and NeuroPsychoanalysis. Dear Mr. Beckett: A Barney Rosset Scrapbook, edited by Dr. Oppenheim and curated by Astrid
Mysers Rosset, is currently in production.
Sam Slote
is Associate Professor in English at Trinity College Dublin and is a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. He has co-edited
five volumes on Joyce: Probes: Genetic Studies in Joyce (1995); Genitricksling Joyce (1999), How Joyce Wrote
‘Finnegans Wake’: A Chapter-by- Chapter Genetic Guide (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), Renascent Joyce
(University of Miami Press, 2013), and Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts (SUNY Press, 2013). His annotated edition
of Ulysses was published by Alma Classics in 2012. His writings on Beckett have appeared in the Journal of Beckett
Studies, Samuel Beckett in Context, and Publishing Samuel Beckett. He is a Co-Director of the Samuel Beckett Summer
School.
Paul Stewart
is Professor of Literature at the University of Nicosia, Cyprus. He is the author of two book on Beckett: Sex and
Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Works (Palgrave 2011) and Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions
(Rodopi, 2006). He is a regular contributor to The Journal of Beckett Studies and Samuel Beckett Today/
Aujourd’hui. He is currently working on questions of narrative and ethics in Beckett and Coetzee, as well as the radio and
stage adaptations of Lessness. He is also a creative writer; his first novel Now Then was published by Armida Press in
2014 and his first volume of poetry, And Other Elsewheres appeared in 2009.
Derval Tubridy
is Dean of the Graduate School, Associate Pro-Warden for Research and Enterprise, and Senior Lecturer in Literature and
Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Author of Thomas Kinsella: The Peppercanister Poems (2001),
and editor of a special edition of Irish Studies Review (16/3, 2008), she has published chapters in The Oxford History
of the Irish Book, Volume V: The Irish Book in English, 1891-2000; Beckett and Nothing; A Companion to
James Joyce; Contemporary Debates in Literature and Philosophy; Ireland: Space, Text, Time; Seeing
Things: Literature and the Visual, The Irish Book in the Twentieth Century and Samuel Beckett: A Casebook,
as well as articles in Performance Research; The Irish University Review; Irish Studies Review; The Journal of
Beckett Studies, and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui. She co-organised the 2006 conference on Beckett and the
visual arts, Beckett and Company at Goldsmiths and Tate Modern. Her research has been funded by the Fulbright
Commission and by the British Academy. She is currently working on a book on Beckett and contemporary art called Art
after Beckett.
Dirk Van Hulle
is professor of English literature at the University of Antwerp (Centre for Manuscript Genetics). His recent publications
include the monographs Modern Manuscripts: The Extended Mind and Creative Undoing (2014) and (with Shane
Weller) The Making of Samuel Beckett’s L’Innommable/The Unnamable (2014). With Mark Nixon, he is co-director of
the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP, www.beckettarchive.org), author of Samuel Beckett’s Library (CUP,
2013), and editor in chief of the Journal of Beckett Studies. He is currently preparing the second edition of the
Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (Cambridge UP).
David Wheatley
is Senior Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of four collections of poetry with Gallery Press: Thirst
(1997), Misery Hill (2000), Mocker (2006) and A Nest on the Waves (2010), and has edited the work of James
Clarence Mangan for Gallery Press and Samuel Beckett’s Selected Poems 1930-1989 for Faber and Faber. His
Contemporary British Poetry is published by Palgrave (2015), and other critical work has appeared in The Oxford
Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2012), The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry (2013), The Oxford
Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2013), The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War
Poetry (2007), The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney (2009) and The Cambridge Companion to
Contemporary Irish Poetry (2003). His articles and reviews have appeared widely, in journals including London
Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian and Dublin Review, and his poetry has featured in
various anthologies, including Identity Parade (Bloodaxe, 2010) and The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry (2010), and
among his prizes are the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize and the Poetry
Ireland/Friends Provident National Poetry Competition.
Lectures:
C. J. Ackerley: tba
Amanda Dennis: Beckett, Sensation and Agency
Lois Oppenheim: fMRI in Prose: Beckett and Neuroscience
Paul Stewart: “as innocent as the sperm unspent”: Sex and Power in Beckett’s Works
Derval Tubridy: ‘The unthought and the harrowing': Samuel Beckett’s Necessary Art
David Wheatley: ‘Aspermatic Days and Nights’: Samuel Beckett and an Anti-Genealogy of
Contemporary Irish Poetry
The Loutishness of Learning: a roundtable on teaching Beckett – chaired by Jonathan Heron
Seminars:
‘Beckett and the Visual Arts - Derval Tubridy
Beckett and Visual Art is a series of four seminars that explore the intersections between Beckett’s writing and the visual
arts. Tracing lines of enquiry through ideas of the body, language, subjectivity, performativity and identity, the seminars
critically analyse the ways in which questions that are key to Beckett’s prose, poetry and performance underpin significant
moments in contemporary art.
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Seminar 1: Trace, Structure, Movement
• Samuel Beckett, Watt, Bruce Nauman ‘Stamping in the Studio’, ‘Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk)’, Nauman, ‘Raw
Materials’, Tate Modern.
• Steven Connor ‘Shifting Ground’.
• Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, ‘Nauman.. Beckett… Beckett. Nauman: The Necessity of Working in an Interdisciplinary
Way, Circa 104 (Summer 2003), 47-50.
• Kathryn Chiong, ‘Nauman’s Beckett Walk’, October, Vol. 86. (Autumn, 1998), pp. 63-81.
• Deleuze, Giles, ‘He Stuttered’, Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London:
Verso, 1998), pp. 107-114.
• Beckett Quadrat I + II and Come and Go. Sol Le Witt.
• Sol Lewitt ‘Drawing Series 1968 (Fours)’, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’, Theories and
Documents of Contemporary Art, pp.822-827.
• Rosalind Krauss, ‘LeWitt’s Ark’, OCTOBER 121, Summer 2007, pp. 111–113.
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Seminar 2: Language, Subjectivity and the Performing/Speaking Body
Beckett, Not I and A Piece of Monologue. Screening of Beckett’s version and Neil Jordan’s version: a comparative
reading. Beckett, The Unnamable; Screening of Jenny Triggs animated short film The Unnamable.
• Simon Critchley, ‘Who Speaks in the Work of Samuel Beckett?’ Yale French Studies, No. 93, The Place of Maurice
Blanchot (1998), pp. 114-130.
• Emile Benveniste, ‘Of Subjectivity in Language’.
• Blanchot, Maurice. ‘Where now? Who now?’ Samuel Beckett: Longman Critical Readers. Ed. Jennifer Birkett and Kate
Ince (London: Longman, 2000), pp.93-98.
• Derval Tubridy, ‘Vain Reasonings: Not I’ in Samuel Beckett: A Casebook, ed. Jennifer Jeffers (New York and London:
Garland, 1998), pp. 111-131.
• Rebecca Horn, BodyLandscapes.
• Stelarc, ‘Beyond the Body: Amplified Body, Laser Eyes, and Third Hand’.
• Sophie de Oliveira barata, ‘The Alternative Limb Project’.
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Seminar 3: Imaging the text: Beckett and the Livre d’Artiste
An overview of artists’ engagements with Beckett’s work through limited edition artists’ books. Focus on Samuel
Beckett’s and Jasper John’s Foirades/Fizzles; Analysis of Johns’s painting Untitled 1972.
• Johns, Jasper. ‘Untitled Statement (1959)’, ‘Interview with G.R. Swenson (1964)’, ‘Sketchbook Notes
(1965)’. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: U of California
Press, 1996), pp.323-326.
• Judith Weschler, Jasper Johns ‘Take An Object’.
• Judith Weschler, ‘Illustrating Samuel Beckett: The Issue of the Supererogatory’, Art Journal, 1993, vol.52; no.4, pp.3340.
• Elza Adamowicz, ‘État Présent: The livre d’artiste in twentieth century France’, French Studies, Vol. LXIII, No. 2, 189–
198.
• Derval Tubridy, ‘Loose Signatures: Samuel Beckett and the Livre d’Artiste’, Seeing Things: Literature and the
Visual, GRAAT no.28, Tours: Presses Universitaires Francois Rabelais, 2005, pp.109-122.
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Seminar 4: Re-Sounding Beckett
• Morton Feldman’s Words and Music and Neither; Danny McCarthy (curator) Bend it Like
Beckett; John D’Arcy, Beckett Basement; Beckett’s play Breath, and the film version directed by Damien Hirst; Robert
Morris, Untitled 1968; Walter de Maria, The New York Earthroom.
• Listen in advance to Catherine Laws on Beckett and Sound.
• Beckett’s short text ‘neither’, Feldman Neither, Doris Salcedo’s installation ‘Neither’.
• Cage, John. ‘The Future of Music: Credo’. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel
Warner (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 25-28.
• Laws, Catherine. ‘Morton Feldman’s Neither: A Musical Translation of Beckett’s Text’, Samuel Beckett and Music. Ed.
Mary Bryden (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1998), pp.57-85.
• Everett Frost, ‘A Note on the Word Man’, Mary Bryden (ed), Samuel Beckett and Music (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998), pp. 47-55.
• Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, ‘After the Sublime, the State of Aesthetics’, The
Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 89-107,
135-143.
• Derval Tubridy, “Beckett’s Spectral Silence: Breath and the Sublime” Limit(e) Beckett 1 (2010): 102-122.
Beckett and Poetry - David Wheatley
As his place on pub posters of Irish writers attests, Samuel Beckett’s place in the Irish popular imagination is secure.
While Beckett the poet remains understandably overshadowed by the playwright and novelist, the poems have played their
part – both in Seán Ó Mordha’s documentaries and Jack MacGowran’s recordings – in the popularisation of his work.
Less well established, however, is the nature of Beckett the poet’s relationship to the rest of the Irish poetic canon. A
number of competing trends can nevertheless be identified. The first brackets Beckett with his 1930s confrères Thomas
MacGreevy, Denis Devlin and Brian Coffey as an Irish modernist. The roots of this identification are twofold: in Beckett’s
‘Recent Irish Poetry’ (1934), his polemic against neo-Revivalist verse, and in subsequent revivals of these 30s poets. A
second trend is to find Beckettian traces in contemporary poets, but not in the form of Beckett’s own poems: in his Beckett
and Contemporary Irish Writing, Stephen Watt devotes a chapter to Beckett and Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon, while
making only cursory reference to Beckett’s poetry. A third trend is the responses of contemporary poets themselves to
Beckett’s work: here again, Muldoon and Mahon stand out, while other poets (Heaney, Boland) appear to have little or no
use for him in their personal canons.
In our seminars we will examine Beckett’s own poetry, and attempt to trace a genealogy of the Beckettian in Irish poetry
from the 30s to the present day. Among the writers whose work we will consider are: Thomas MacGreevy, Denis Devlin,
Brian Coffey, Seán Ó Ríordáin, Blánaid Salkeld, Thomas Kinsella, Derek Mahon, Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon, Eavan
Boland, Catherine Walsh, and Justin Quinn.
Texts: Samuel Beckett, Collected Poems.
Beckett’s Manuscripts - Mark Nixon & Dirk Van Hulle
During his lifetime, Samuel Beckett donated several manuscripts to archives at universities such as Trinity College,
Dublin, and the University of Reading. By studying the marginalia in the books of his personal library, his reading notes
on literature, philosophy and psychology, his drafts and typescripts, we investigate how these manuscripts can contribute
to an interpretation of Beckett’s works. The methodological framework is the theory of genetic criticism, which sets itself
a double task: the ‘genetic’ task of making the manuscripts accessible (ordering, deciphering and transcribing), resulting in
a genetic dossier; the ‘critical’ task of reconstructing the genesis from a chosen point of view (psychoanalysis,
sociocriticism, narratology, etc.). Different methods of transcription (diplomatic, linear, topographic) and encoding
(markup languages, the Text Encoding Initiative’s guidelines) will be discussed and applied to Beckett’s manuscripts. The
potential interpretive consequences of this genetic research will be discussed in the second part of the seminar.
Performance Workshop - Jonathan Heron & Nicholas Johnson
SAMUEL BECKETT LABORATORY
The Performance Workshop of the Samuel Beckett Summer School
9 – 14 AUGUST 2015, DU Players, Samuel Beckett Centre
The Samuel Beckett Laboratory, in partnership with the Samuel Beckett Summer School and DU Players, provides a space
and occasion for fundamental research into Samuel Beckett’s work in and through performance. Working in a black-box
studio space over five days, we will create an ensemble of students, scholars, performers, directors, designers, and
technicians to explore problems, processes, and philosophies in the practice of Beckett’s theatre. The 2014 Summer
School meeting constitutes our third experiment as the “Beckett Lab,” in which performance is viewed not only as an end
in itself, but also used as a research method. The textual focus of this work is not limited to Beckett’s plays, but will
extend to a variety of Beckettian voices, voids, fragments, and fizzles, to discover what occurs when these are embodied in
a specific time and space. Interest in performance as a praxis is the sole prerequisite; this laboratory is absolutely open to
non-professionals.
METHODS and FOCUS of our WORK
The Samuel Beckett Laboratory is founded on the simple principle that by approaching Beckett’s texts through
performance, deeper insight into the texts’ function or meaning can be gained. This function of performance as a
methodology is taken as a truism for playscripts, where it is widely agreed that the kinaesthetic or practical knowledge
achieved by the performer, director, designer, or technician is a valuable aspect of attaining a deep understanding of the
work. The laboratory applies this principle across genre to include prose, poetry, radio, television, film, correspondence,
and manuscript/draft material. The Laboratory exists to cultivate a safe and facilitated environment where, for the purpose
of both research and pedagogy, scholars can engage in an inclusive manner with all of Beckett’s writing as performance
material.
A single text from Beckett’s late prose is the main focus of our work across the week. The text is Worstward Ho, written
in 1980-81 and published in 1983, and we will be attentive to Beckett’s drafting process of this work, viewing and
responding to the drafts that are held at Trinity College Dublin. Other sources consulted will include Beckett’s Play (1962)
and Shakespeare’s King Lear. With two facilitators creating a working environment that elevates the non-hierarchical and
exploratory embodiment of the “ensemble,” the workshop participants are all invited to respond through performance,
reflecting on possible elements of dramaturgy, design, acting, and directing of the selected piece. Over the course of five
days of engagement with the source texts and various performance practices, this approach is designed to generate a form
of deep knowledge of the text’s structure, cross-reference, and operation as a “living thought” that can be embodied or
communicated in manifold ways to an audience.
Visit the Beckett Laboratory page for further details
Reading Group - Sam Slote
Over the course of the week we will slowly and patiently make our way through Beckett’s Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies,
The Unnamable), which, along with Waiting for Godot, forms the heart of Beckett’s ‘frenzy of writing’ from 1946 to
1953. We will address issues of narrative, style, humour, repetition and seriality. While some previous familiarity with
either the novels of the Trilogy or its predecessors (Murphy and Watt) is recommended, it is not necessary. I recommend
using the new Faber editions of the novels, but, again, this is not necessary.
Details on the performance schedule and activities (tour of the Beckett country, Beckett Pub Quiz, etc.) will be announced
at a later date.