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Beckett International Foundation Seminar

Minghella Studios, University of Reading, 4 November 2023

Registration for the BIF seminar on Saturday 4 November 2023 is now available here.

As in previous years, our speakers represent a mixture of early career researchers as well as established scholars, local and international, reflecting current research into Beckett’s work. We hope that the programme will, as in the past, attract a wide and varied audience.

Programme

10.30 – 11.00: Registration / Welcome

11.00 – 11.30: Xander Ryan (University of Reading): ‘From Little Jerusalem to the Paris Conservatoire: Samuel Beckett, Leslie Daiken, Melanie Daiken’

11.30 – 12.00: Discussion

12.00 – 12.15: Tea / Coffee Break

12.15 – 12.45: Velibor Topic (Actor): ‘Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Reflections 30 Years On’

12.45 – 1.15: Discussion

1.15 – 2.15: Lunch

2.15 – 2.45: Elizabeth Barry (University of Warwick): ‘“The Protestant Thing to Do”: Beckett, Charity and the Ambivalent Work of Social Care’

2.45 – 3.15: Discussion

3.15 – 3.30: Tea / Coffee Break

3.30 – 4.00: Hannah Simpson (University of Edinburgh): ‘Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance’

4.00 – 4.30: Discussion

To attend this year’s BIF Seminar, please register here: https://www.store.reading.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/faculty-of-arts-humanities-social-science/english-literature-department/beckett-international-foundation-research-seminar-2023 

We look forward to seeing you there!

We are pleased to announce that the 33^rd BIF Seminar will take place at the University of Reading on Saturday 4 November 2023, with the following speakers:

Elizabeth Barry (University of Warwick): ‘“The Protestant Thing to Do”: Beckett, Charity and the Ambivalent Work of Social Care’

Xander Ryan (University of Reading): ‘From Little Jerusalem to the Paris Conservatoire: Samuel Beckett, Leslie Daiken, Melanie Daiken’

Hannah Simpson (University of Edinburgh): ‘Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance’

Velibor Topic (Actor): ‘Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Reflections 30 Years On’

Further details re timings and how to register will be sent out later this week. Please save the date, and we hope to see you at the seminar!

We write to provide news of progress about the acquisition of the Joyce archive at Special Collections, University of Reading. This progress has been somewhat hampered by delays outside of our control, beyond our previous announcements of a schedule for curating the archive and opening it for public viewing; therefore, we thought it helpful to provide this update.

Work began last year on curating and cataloguing the materials then arrived in Reading, including the correspondence and family documents and photographs. The University has also employed a qualified postdoctoral researcher to conduct an initial scoping of the materials and to input to the cataloguing process.

However, customs delays meant that the portion of the archive coming from France only arrived in Reading in late April this year. This means that we have put in place a new timetable for making the collection available to the public and launching the materials for research:

1. 26^th September 2023 – 2 February 2024. Small exhibition of rare books, art works and artefacts;
2. Autumn 2023. Full access to published materials in the Joyce Open Access Room, a dedicated space alongside our extant Samuel Beckett Open Access collection. Rarer books will be available on request via the Reading Room;
3. December 2024/January 2025. Launch event for the archival materials and letters in Reading; publication of a physical catalogue alongside the web-based catalogue, with full descriptive content. Opening of archive for researcher use;
4. Summer 2026 Conference about the archive with invited speakers and CFP.

Please address any enquiries to Steven Matthews, Co-Director of the Samuel Beckett Research Centre, at s.matthews@reading.ac.uk

Beckett’s work has inspired many contemporary visual artists, but in recent years it has been the area of artists’ film that has seen the clearest impact.

On Friday 23^rd of June 2023, The Samuel Beckett Research Centre at the University of Reading will present rarely screened work by several artists. The screenings will be followed by a roundtable discussion and the launch of Samuel Beckett’s Afterlives: Adaptation, Remediation, Appropriation, the recent collection of essays edited by Jonathan Bignell, Anna McMullan and Pim Verhulst.

The programme for the event includes:

Introduction by Conor Carville 

Stan Douglas, Vidéo (2007): Introduced by Pim Verhulst.  

Stan Douglas’ video installation Vidéo is a reimagining of both Orson Welles’s film “The Trial” (based on Kafka’s novel of the same name) and Beckett’s film “Film”.  

John Gerrard, Bone Work (Gulf of Mexico) (2022): Introduced by John Gerrard (Via Zoom).  

John Gerrard’s Bone Work (Gulf of Mexico) is a simulation centred on sixteen fragments of dead coral found by the artist on the shores of the Yucatán Peninsula on the Gulf Of Mexico. 

Duncan Campbell, o Joan, no…(2006): Introduced by Duncan Campbell.  

Duncan Campbell’s o Joan, no…(2006) is a short film drawing on the lighting directions and effects in Beckett’s Play.  

Roundtable Discussion on Beckett, Artists’ Film/Installation and Adaptation. 

Jonathan Bignell (Reading); Pim Verhulst (Antwerp); Duncan Campbell; David Houston Jones (Exeter); Anthony Paraskeva (Roehampton); Derval Tubridy (Goldsmiths); Jivitesh Vashisht (UCD).  

The screenings will begin at 2:00pm in Minghella Studios’s cinema at the University of Reading, with the roundtable discussion beginning at 4:30pm. The event will be followed by a reception at 6:00pm.

The event is free, and all are welcome, but places are limited, so please register here. More details of timings and participants to follow.

Image: Stan Douglas. Vidéo, 2007. High definition video installation, colour, sound (six musical variations. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner New York/London, and Victoria Miro, London.

Samuel Beckett & Japan: A Virtual Seminar Series

Seminar 3:

Saturday 11^th March 2023 (via MS Teams) 

10-11.30am Dublin/London; 11am-12.30pm CET; 7-8.30pm Tokyo

Please join us for the third session in this seminar series examining aspects of the reception of Samuel Beckett’s work in Japan. The history of Beckett in this region includes performance practices that have introduced (and adapted) Beckett’s work for Japanese theatre, translations of Beckett’s work into Japanese since the 1950s, and important scholarly interventions into the field. There is a rich record of scholarship emerging from Japan that has expanded the global reach of our understanding of Beckett. The foundational scholarly and translation work of Professors Shin’ya Ando and Yasunari Takahashi exemplifies this, as does the work of the Beckett Research Circle of Japan, which was founded in 1992 and continues Japanese critical engagements with Beckett. This seminar series seeks to mark these histories of Beckett’s presence in Japanese culture, as well as explore the significance of Japanese thinking and performance practices on our understanding of Beckett.

This series is presented by the Samuel Beckett Working Group at IFTR and the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast.

Mariko Hori Tanaka, ‘Samuel Beckett and Tadashi Suzuki’

Tadashi Suzuki, a world-famous director known for his eponymous training method, remarks that he was influenced by Samuel Beckett. Though he himself has not undertaken to direct Beckett, he uses scenes from Beckett in his directorial work.

Suzuki, along with other young Underground artists, resisted the establishment and questioned the status quo and rationality in general, expressing madness and indecency. The impetus of that resistance came out of feelings of defeat within the political movements of the 1960s to make societal change. The dream of their revolution did not come true and this sense of defeat, despair and hopelessness were presented by Underground artists. Suzuki admits that his characters, whether they are in Greek plays or Shakespeare, are ‘fight[ing] the battle of the defeated’ (Suzuki, The Way of Acting, 110). Suzuki’s theatrical works and his emphasis on stamping functioned as the recovery of the body and the spirit that have been estranged since the Meiji era. There are comparable approaches to the body in the work of each of these artists; what Suzuki demands is similar to what Beckett seeks from actors. In this talk, I will explore how Beckett is influential in Suzuki’s work and how Suzuki’s directorial method and philosophy are akin to what Beckett demands of his actors.

Douglas Atkinson, ‘Saying I: Beckett and Modern Japanese Literature’

The goal of this paper is to explore a very peculiar phenomenon in Beckett scholarship, namely, the perplexing reception of Beckett’s prose in Japan.  As Tajiri Yoshiki has demonstrated, in contrast to the reception of his theatrical works, Beckett’s prose has played only a minor role in 20^th century Japanese Literature, with few if any major authors acknowledging the influence of Beckett’s prose.  Given the stated centrality of the prose in regard to his own work, this response is strange enough. However, when we scratch beyond the surface of Modern Japanese Literature, the absence of a meaningful response to Beckett’s prose shows the signs of a deeper, and potentially darker, mystery to be solved.

As such, this paper will follow the work of Karatani Kojin and other major thinkers in Modern Japanese Literature in an attempt to situate – thematically and historically – what I have termed the ‘non-reception’ of Beckett’s prose in Japan.  My primary focus will be to show the striking similarities between Beckett’s prose and the Japanese shishōsetsu, or “I-Novel”, in order to forge a new vantage from which to contextualize the (non)reception of Beckett’s prose in Japan.

To attend this session please book via the following link, the meeting link will be circulated shortly before the session:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/samuel-beckett-japan-a-virtual-seminar-series-tickets-546224822147

Series Organisers: Mariko Hori Tanaka (Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo), Michiko Tsushima (University of Tsukuba), Kumiko Kiuchi (Tokyo Institute of Technology), Yoshiko Takebe (Shujitsu University), and Trish McTighe (Queen’s University Belfast).

For queries relating to the event and booking please contact t.mctighe@qub.ac.uk.

Speaker Biographies

Mariko Hori Tanaka is a professor at Aoyama Gakuin University. She has published essays and book chapters on Samuel Beckett and other playwrights. She co-edited Samuel Beckett and Pain (Rodopi, 2013), Samuel Beckett and Trauma (Manchester UP, 2018), Influencing Beckett / Beckett Influencing (L’Harmattan, 2020), Beckett’s Voices / Voicing Beckett (Brill, 2021) and Samuel Beckett and Catastrophe (Palgrave McMillan, 2023). In Japanese, she has authored Beckett Junrei [Beckett Pilgrimage] (Sanseido, 2007), Kaitei o Kasaneru Godot o Machinagara: Enshutsuka to shite no Beckett [Revised Versions of Waiting for Godot: Beckett as a Director] (Fujiwara-shoten, 2017).

Douglas Atkinson teaches at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel where he lectures in critical thinking, rhetoric, and academic composition. He holds a PhD in philosophy and specializes in 20^th century Continental Philosophy, with an emphasis on the intersection between philosophy and literature. His research focuses primarily on the philosophic import of Maurice Blanchot and his influence on the philosophy of language.  His most recent publications have appeared in Twentieth-Century Literature and Samuel Becket Today/Aujourd’hui, and he has organized conferences on Samuel Beckett and the Nonhuman and Samuel Beckett and the Anthropocene.  He is currently working on a critical rereading of the Japanese reception of Samuel Beckett’s prose.

The University of Gdańsk Samuel Beckett Seminar 2023

Who Wrote Godot?
18-19 May 2023
University of Gdańsk, Poland

The title of the seminar – Who Wrote Godot? – was suggested by Professor S.E. Gontarski (Florida State University, USA). During the seminar, he will be in Gdańsk/Sopot to launch his new book Bad Godots: “Vladimir enters from the barrel” and other Interventions, published in the Cambridge University Press “Elements in Beckett Studies” series. Professor Gontarski’s keynote address will be followed by a showing of the films and documentaries in which he has been involved since the early 1980s. We invite scholars who are eager to share their current work on Beckett in a variety of (global) contexts. We suggest that the question posed in the seminar title and in the following note by Professor Gontarski might trigger papers and discussions of a variety of works, in a variety of ways, and through a variety of approaches.

“Who, finally, wrote the script for the Waiting for Godot we are reading, or who ‘authored’ the performances we watch? The answer may depend on what one means by such a question, which edition one is holding, say, or how much attention the producer and director (at least) have paid to the script they at least began with before other theatrical professionals – producers, designers, directors, actors, and investors – entered the scene? Some texts of Beckett’s first produced play were censored, others localized, overtly re-written, and, as published, these remain in circulation, part of the marketplace amid serial reprints and resales. They are seldom withdrawn or destroyedfor reasons of corruption or infidelity, and so they remain in circulation, sitting in libraries, school closets and on personal bookshelves to be lent to friends and reused for performances.

The alterations in these texts may be minor on the whole, but they are almost never inconsequential. ‘French’s’ or ‘Samuel French’s Acting Editions’ are high water marks of textual corruption, the product of unauthorized intervention even as they have attracted little attention from Beckett scholars. Minor as each may be individually, the range of these alterations is vast, as Beckett’s terse, astringent prose is continually inflated, the silences rendered less so. In the London premieres, for example, the sparse, arid set is littered with a barrel, cattails, hanging vines, ‘A rostrum’, and other cluttering ‘details’ – some of Pozzo’s whip-wielding cruelty is eliminated. As strangers approach, our two waiters ‘huddle together, behind the barrel’ (SF 10). What barrel? Who wrote this? Not Beckett! But this is the text as performed in London in 1955 and subsequently published repeatedly.

While all theatrical performance is subject to variation – from show to show, from theatre space to theatre space, from night to night, from actor to replacement actor – so that all performance is adaptation, to one degree or another, but the degree of variation, the differences between the contingencies of performance, the failures of memory, say, and the deliberate reconfiguration of a script and its staging are the issues at play here. The productions of Waiting for Godot that premiered in London at both The Arts (August 1955) and Criterion Theatres (September 1955-March 1956) and the Dublin premiere at the Pike Theatre (October 1955) were co-authored texts, as was the American premiere that opened in Coral Gables, Florida, in January of 1956 – each director tampering with, localizing, regularizing, stamping the text as his own by intervening and altering in the script far beyond what the author would deem acceptable (if he knew). Both credited (the LC in the UK) and uncredited interventionists (producers, directors, and actors on both sides of the Atlantic) shaped and altered what audiences saw in performance, some of what was subsequently and repeatedly published.” (S.E. Gontarski)

Confirmed keynote speakers for the seminar are:
• Professor Octavian Saiu (Hong Kong Metropolitan University): Rereading,
Rewriting, Reimagining Beckett: Text and Context Beyond the Canon;
• Professor Robson Corrêa de Camargo (Federal University of Goiás, Brazil): Samuel
Beckett and Maskara at the Brazilian Savannah: Lost and Found.

In addition to the above, Dr hab. Tomasz Wiśniewski, Prof. UG, will discuss two recent productions Zé Celso’s Esperando Godot by Teatro de Oficina Uzyna Uzona (São Paulo, Brazil) and Jarosław Fret’s Back to Beckett by Teatr ZAR / The Grotowski Institute (Wrocław, Poland) as examples of experimental Beckett for the present times.

The University of Gdańsk Samuel Beckett Seminar is part of the Between.Pomiędzy Dispersed Festival, which also includes the conference The Geography of the Theatre Imagination (18-20 May 2023), performance workshops run by Katarzyna Pastuszak, open discussions with Teatr Amareya and the Sopot Dance Theatre, and other events. For more information on Between.Pomiędzy see: www.between.org.pl

We invite proposals for 15-minute papers that provide insight into current Beckett scholarship.The deadline for a 200 word proposal is 15 March 2023 (tomasz.wisniewski@ug.edu.pl). The seminar fee is 200 PLN / 50 euros.

The conference is organised by the Beckett Research Group in Gdańsk (University of Gdańsk) in partnership with TheTheatreTimes, The Grotowski Institute in Wrocław, and Teatr ZAR.

The Beckett Research Group in Gdańsk was founded and is led by Dr hab. Tomasz Wiśniewski, Prof. UG. It is affiliated to the Department of Theatre Arts in the English and American Studies Institute at the University of Gdańsk. It brings together people in English, Romance, and Polish studies and artists from various centres in Poland and abroad. Its honorary patron is Professor S.E. Gontarski of Florida State University in the USA. BRGiG works together with Beckett scholars from Poland and the world (Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, the Federal University of Goiás in Brazil), and with translators and artists engaging in work related to Beckett. Indeed, the encounter of academic and creative worlds – searching for varied and not always complementary ways of seeing Beckett’s work – is the main axis of the activities of BRGiG. We organize regular Beckett seminars in the Three Cities area, and also theatre workshops/laboratories and discussions with poets, writers, film makers, and theatre workers. We also engage in publishing activities and support various artistic projects. In 2012, the collections of essays Samuel Beckett. Tradycja-awangarda, and Back to the Beckett Text opened the Between.Pomiędzy series published by the University of Gdańsk Press. In 2017, the eleventh volume in the series appeared, entitled Beckett w XXI wieku. Rozpoznanie. In 2016, from Maski publishers, the book Przedstawienie Becketta (Representing Beckett) appeared, containing Polish translations of essays by S.E. Gontarski. Cooperation with the Sopot Dance Theatre has led to the production Wszystko co widać. Ohio, and the film All This This Here. Professor Gontarski’s laboratory work from the Festival is documented in the film “…but the clouds…,” which has been shown in Poland and the USA, during the Beckett Summer School at Trinity College Dublin, and at the Charles University in Prague. In 2010, the documentary film Back to the Beckett Text (Beckett na Plaży) appeared, and at the 2019 Between.Pomiędzy Festival, S.E. Gontarski’s film Beckett on the Baltic had its world premiere.

The Samuel Beckett Research Centre at the University of Reading is delighted to announce the appointment of two new Creative Fellows 2022-23: Claire-Louise Bennett and Simon Okotie.

Claire-Louise Bennett has written two acclaimed works of fiction. Her debut Pond was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2015. It was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2016. In 2022 the highly-anticipated novel Checkout 19 was a pick of the year in The Guardian, The Telegraph and the New Statesman. It was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. Her short story ‘Invisible Bird recently appeared in The New Yorker.

Claire-Louise studied drama and has worked extensively in theatre, often speaking of her admiration for Samuel Beckett’s plays. Beckett’s prose too has been a major influence. In an interview in The Guardian she remarks how reading Beckett gives her ‘a sense of space and a kind of an ease, almost; you know, I don’t know if there is any kind of meaning and I don’t like to get too attached to ideas anyhow. I’m quite able to sort of just hang in a way.’ We are very pleased that Claire-Louise has taken the opportunity to hang a bit more with Beckett by engaging with Reading’s world-renowned collection of his papers.

Simon Okotie is a fiction writer and essayist. He is the author of Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon?, In the Absence of Absalon, and After Absalon, an acclaimed trilogy of novels, all published by Salt. In the Absence of Absalon was longlisted for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize. Simon’s work has appeared in gorse, 3:AM Magazine, Firmament and The White Review. ‘Two Degrees of Freedom,’ a short story, is published by Nightjar Press. ‘Bindings’ was selected for the Best British Short Stories 2021 anthology.

Of the protagonist of Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon? Blake Morrison notes in the London Review of Books that ‘There’s a touch of Charlie Chaplin about him, or of John Cleese, as mediated by Beckett’. Okotie readily acknowledges the influence of Beckett on his work, and in particular the later short prose and ‘closed space’ pieces. The TLS has drawn attention to Simon’s ‘obsessive attention to the miraculous geometries of human movement’ and this is just one way in which his writing shows an affinity with Beckett’s. Simon is currently completing a novel and a collection of essays. We are very much looking forward to having him with us over the next year.

Over the course of their year-long Fellowships, Claire-Louise and Simon will engage with the contents, history and spaces of the world-leading archive relating to Samuel Beckett’s work which is held at the University’s Special Collections. Supported by colleagues at the Samuel Beckett Research Centre, through this engagement with the archives they will produce new creative work, to be premiered at the end of their time with us. Claire-Louise and Simon follow our previous fellows, Hannah Khalil, Duncan Campbell, Eimear McBride, and novelist Robert McCrum and composer Tim Parkinson, in accepting a Creative Fellowship at the Centre. We are very excited about the opportunity to work with them.

The School of English at Trinity College Dublin is delighted to announce that it will be hosting Niamh Campbell and Nathan O’Donnell as the inaugural Beckett Creative Fellows this coming academic year, 2022-23.

This scheme is a collaboration with the Samuel Beckett Research Centre at the University of Reading, which has pioneered a series of Creative Fellowships since 2017. Through the fellowships at Reading and Trinity the rich collection of archival materials mapping Beckett’s creative process are made available to writers and artists, so that Beckett’s archive becomes a practical and inspiring creative workshop. As Beckett Creative Fellows Niamh Campbell and Nathan O’Donnell will produce original creative works that draw on traces and threads of Beckett’s ideas discovered in the archive.

Niamh Campbell won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2020, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2021. She has published two novels, This Happy (2020) and We Were Young (2022), a monograph on the writer John McGahern (Sacred Weather, 2019), and short pieces of fiction, non-fiction, academic criticism, and art writing for a number of journals in Ireland.

Niamh Campbell’s project takes as its point of departure notions of transcendent banality, eternal return, ideological and idiomatic limitation, habit and logjam, and compulsive or onanistic personal memory – ideas drawn from the Beckettian universe and important to her own work. The project is especially interested in looking at writerly ‘voice’ and expressive patterning as habitual or recursive phenomena by using recording devices, voice-to-text software, and vocal performances to develop and supplement the work.

Nathan O’Donnell is a writer and artist based in Dublin. He has published fiction and non-fiction in numerous journals including The Dublin Review, gorse, The Tangerine, and 3:AM, amongst others; he is also one of the co-editors of Paper Visual Art and he writes and publishes regularly in the field of contemporary art. He had his first solo exhibition at the Illuminations Gallery, Maynooth University, in 2020; he was writer-in-residence at Maynooth University, 2020–21; and he has also been awarded artist’s commissions – for publishing-based projects – from IMMA, Ormston House, Dublin City Council, the Arts Council, and South Dublin County Council.

Nathan O’Donnell will use this fellowship to develop a project titled ‘under all weathers’, responding to the Beckett archive through a meteorological lens – gathering weather data, meteorological references, and climate metaphors, from across Beckett’s work as well as his letters and other archival sources. O’Donnell is a writer with an interest in experimental publishing; his aim, with this project, is to produce a set of text scores which will be circulated within a pamphlet-style publication.

The Beckett Creative Fellowships at Trinity are coordinated by the School of English in partnership with The Library of Trinity College Dublin, Trinity Long Room Hub, and Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies. This project is a collaboration with the Beckett Creative Fellowships organised by the Samuel Beckett Research Centre at the University of Reading: https://research.reading.ac.uk/beckett/creative-fellowships/.

For further information contact Dr Julie Bates, School of English, Trinity College Dublin: batesju@tcd.ie