Members of the Samuel Beckett Research Centre published a number of journal articles, chapters and books in 2020.
Books
Samuel Beckett’s Philosophy Notes, edited by Steven Matthews, Co-Director of The Samuel Beckett Research Centre, and Matthew Feldman, is a major new Beckett text that reveals major aspects of Beckett’s philosophical thought and raises larger questions concerning the relation between philosophy and literature in the twentieth century and beyond.
Anna McMullan’s Samuel Beckett’s intermedial ecosystems: closed space environments across the stage, prose and media works draws on the concept of ecosystems to investigate selected Beckett works across different media which present worlds where the human does not occupy a privileged place in the order of creation: rather Beckett’s human figures are trapped in a regulated system in which they have little agency.
Book chapters
Jonathan Bignell’s chapter, “Random dottiness”: Samuel Beckett and the reception of Harold Pinter’s early dramas in Influencing Beckett / Beckett Influencing (Rakoczy, Tanaka and Johnson, 2020), analyses the significance of Beckett to the British reception of the playwright Harold Pinter’s early work.
In his chapter, Beckett and television: anachronism as innovation in Samuel Beckett and Technology (Adar, Kiryushina and Nixon, 2020), Jonathan Bignell argues that Beckett’s dramas written for television (from Eh Joe in 1966 to Nacht und Traume in 1983) work as reflexive analyses of television technology’s uneasy position as an “old” and also a “new” medium.
In his chapter, ‘The air is full of our cries’: staging Godot during apartheid South Africa in Beckett and Politics (Davies and Bailey, 2020), Matthew McFrederick offers new readings into this seminal South African production and the neglected politics of Beckett and race on South African and international stages.
Lucy Jeffery (Beckett Research Centre Postdoctoral Fellow) has written ‘Words and Music “or some other trouble”: Vaguening on the Airwaves’ in Beckett and Technology (Adar, Kiryushina, and Nixon, 2021).
Journal articles
Mark Nixon, Co-Director of the Beckett International Foundation, was one of the editors of a special issue of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, Beckett and Intermediality / Beckett, artiste intérmedial.
Jonathan Bignell analyses tensions between medium specificity and intermediality in Beckett’s first original drama for television, Eh Joe (1966) in Specially for television? Eh Joe, intermediality and Beckett’s drama, and also evaluates the significance of the intermedial migrations that happened to the “Beckett on Film” project in When Beckett on Film migrated to television.
In Samuel Beckett and intermedial performance: passing between, Anna McMullan, Co-Director of the Beckett International Foundation, analyses two intermedial adaptations of works by Beckett for performance in relation to Ágnes Petho’s definition of intermediality as a border zone or passageway between media, grounded in the “inter-sensuality of perception”.
William Davies, Beckett Research Centre Post-doctoral Fellow considers Beckett and his war writing in ‘Crawling in the Flanders mud’: Samuel Beckett, war writing and scatological pacifism, exploring the depiction of wounded soldiers in Samuel Beckett’s novel Mercier and Camier and the depiction of the degenerating male form in Samuel Beckett’s post-World War II trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable) in Samuel Becket’s trilogy and the revolution of the body in Vichy France.
Lucy Jeffery discusses music and Beckett with SBRC creative fellow Tim Parkinson in an interview published in the Journal of Beckett Studies.
Full publications list
Bignell, J. (2020) Beckett and television: anachronism as innovation. In: Adar, E., Kiryushina, G. and Nixon, M. (eds.) Samuel Beckett and Technology. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. (In Press)
Bignell, J. (2020) “Random dottiness”: Samuel Beckett and the reception of Harold Pinter’s early dramas. In: Rakoczy, A., Hori Tanaka, M. and Johnson, N. (eds.) Influencing Beckett / Beckett Influencing. Collection Karoli. L’Harmattan, Budapest & Paris, pp. 61-74. ISBN 9782343219110
Bignell, J. (2020) Specially for television? Eh Joe, intermediality and Beckett’s drama. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 32 (1). pp. 41-54. ISSN 1875-7405 doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/18757405-03201004
Bignell, J. (2020) When Beckett on Film migrated to television. Књижевна историја (Literary History), 51 (169). pp. 97-108. ISSN 0350-6428 doi: https://doi.org/10.18485/kis.2019.51.169.5
Davies, W. (2020) ‘Crawling in the Flanders mud’: Samuel Beckett, war writing and scatological pacifism. Journal of War and Culture Studies, 13 (2). pp. 145-162. ISSN 1752-6280 doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/17526272.2019.1644273
Davies, W. (2020) Samuel Becket’s trilogy and the revolution of the body in Vichy France. Twentieth-Century Literature, 66 (1). pp. 11-36. ISSN 0041-462X doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-8196685
Jeffery, L. (2020) An Interview with Tim Parkinson. Journal of Beckett Studies, 29 (2). pp. 249-260. ISSN 1759-7811 doi: https://doi.org/10.3366/jobs.2020.0314
Matthews, S. and Feldman, M., eds. (2020) Samuel Beckett’s Philosophy Notes. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
McFrederick, M. (2020) ‘The air is full of our cries’: staging Godot during apartheid South Africa. In: Beckett and Politics. Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 195-211. ISBN 9783030471095 doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1
McMullan, A. (2020) Samuel Beckett and intermedial performance: passing between. Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, 32 (1). pp. 71-85. ISSN 0927-3131 doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/18757405-03201006
McMullan, A. (2020) Samuel Beckett’s intermedial ecosystems: closed space environments across the stage, prose and media works. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. (In Press)
McTighe, T., Morin, E. and Nixon, M., eds. (2020) Beckett and Intermediality / Beckett, artiste intérmedial. Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, 32 (1). Brill, Leiden.