Corresponding with Beckett The Epistolary in Literary Research

A London Beckett Seminar Conference 1-2 June 2018

In association with Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England

Hosted by Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Abstract and Biographies

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Friday, 1st June: CHASE plenary sessions

Dr Lois M. Overbeck (Emory University) “The Letters of Samuel Beckett: A Legacy in the Grey Archives” The Letters of Samuel Beckett has been published in four volumes by Cambridge University Press and acclaimed as a “model edition”. It is, however, a selected edition, presenting, in full, about twenty percent of Beckett’s over sixteen thousand letters held in public and private archives internationally. Letters continue to be discovered and consulted; ownership of Samuel Beckett’s letters is still shifting from private to public archives. While the Letters of Samuel Beckett Project is well-poised to continue the collection process and to merge new materials with letters already consulted and transcribed, we wanted to preserve and share the record of Beckett’s letters in a way that could accommodate additions and integrate changes to the corpus. To this end, we are developing an electronic Location Register of Beckett’s Letters in public archives. The initial phase has been funded by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and supported by Emory University’s Center for Digital Scholarship. Emory University’s Woodruff Library will host this open access, searchable, and sustainable database.

With the Location Register as framework, we envision a Linked Data Project that will harvest rich data from the contents of each Beckett letter (i.e. persons named, Beckett’s writing and publication, productions and adaptations, his reading and attendance at plays, sporting events, concerts, exhibitions, his discussions of art and music). The curated data will be accessible, searchable, and enhanced by chronologies of Beckett’s writing and public events, personal interviews, and photographs. The letters will be contextualised by reference to corollary correspondences. The Linked Data Project will dovetail with the performance database Staging Beckett and the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. To realise the full potential of the Linked Data Project, it is vital not to infringe on the ownership rights in the Grey Archives held in private and corporate collections, but rather to encourage accessibility to these materials. When released as an open access database, it will stand as a resource for many fields of inquiry, and model the centrality of archival resources as well as the interdisciplinary nature of evidence and knowledge that informed the edition of The Letters of Samuel Beckett. DR LOIS MORE OVERBECK is director of the Letters of Samuel Beckett Project in the English Department of Emory University. She has served as research associate of the Laney Graduate School, Emory University from 1990 to 2016, and as visiting lecturer, Department of Theatre Studies, Emory University. She was authorised by Samuel Beckett first as associate editor and then as general editor of The Letters of Samuel Beckett published by Cambridge University Press (2009-16). She directed the edition at Emory University. Current projects with Beckett’s letters include a Location Register of letters in public archives, and the development of a Linked Data Project of Beckett’s Letters, which she will present in this conference.

Lois Overbeck studied at Beloit College, the University of Chicago, and at the University of Pennsylvania. She has held numerous fellowships and grants, most notably from the The Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Diane & Bruce Halle Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for research at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas. She has published widely on Beckett and modern drama. She was a consultant for the Beckett Festival of Radio Plays, was project director of a collaborative, city-wide festival, Beckett/Atlanta (1987) and a coordinator of the Year of Beckett—2006, Atlanta, a festival of performances, lectures and workshops (by international directors and scholars Walter Asmus, Marek Kedzierski, Michael Haerdter working with local theatres and universities). She has co-edited Word and Image: Samuel Beckett and the Visual Text (with Breon Mitchell), Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy (with Paul Jackson) and was editor of The Beckett Circle of the Samuel Beckett Society (1984-89). She has served as dramaturg on several productions including Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, directed by Joseph Chaikin, and A Stain on the Silence (a collection of Beckett’s shorter plays), directed by Brenda Bynum.

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Prof Dirk Van Hulle and Dr Pim Verhulst (University of Antwerp) “A Beckett Manuscript Chronology: Linking the Letters to the Manuscripts” The CUP publication of a substantial part of Beckett’s correspondence is an important milestone. The four-volume edition offers interesting avenues of research for Beckett scholars, but of course the danger is that this landmark publication may create the impression that the work is now finished. The CUP edition is a selection of letters. During our work on the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP), we noticed that some of the letters that did not make it into the four volumes contain valuable data about Beckett’s writing process.

With the Beckett Manuscript Chronology, we would like to link the letters to the manuscripts, by offering brief summaries of the information regarding Beckett’s works mentioned in the letters without quoting them, according to a practice that is already applied at archives such as the ones at Washington University (e.g. the Wenning collection) and the University of Reading (e.g. the Herbert, Cohn and Mitchell collections). The combination of this information, the date of the letter and the BDMP’s research into the composition and publication history of Beckett’s texts is a powerful tool for Beckett studies. This BMC will be developed in close consultation with the Linked Data Project at Emory University.

This Beckett Manuscript Chronology is a digital tool that builds on existing research such as the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project and John Pilling’s Samuel Beckett Chronology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). No doubt due to the limitations of the paper codex format, the Palgrave Chronology did not disclose the sources from which the information was taken. In a digital environment, however, such restrictions do not apply. The Beckett Manuscript Chronology not only combines the information available in Pilling’s Chronology, the Letters of Samuel Beckett Project with its digital developments, and the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project; it also adds information (location and summaries) of unpublished correspondence and links it to specific documents in the BDMP. For example, when Beckett mentions in a letter to a correspondent that he has just written, revised or translated a specific passage in Beckett’s works, our Chronology directly forwards the reader to the document in question.

Having accurate chronological information is not just important from a bio- or bibliographical point of view, for example to date certain draft versions. It also visualises the interconnectedness of Beckett’s œuvre, showing for example that he worked on a particular text while translating another, thus highlighting moments of interaction between texts that remained hidden before. This is especially important to better understand the intermedial nature of Beckett’s work and the reciprocity between different genres and media (prose, theatre, poetry, radio, television, film, etc). The proposed paper will present the rationale behind the Beckett Manuscript Chronology and illustrate it with a “work in progress” demo. PROF DIRK VAN HULLE is professor of English literature at the University of Antwerp and director of the Centre for Manuscript Genetics. With Mark Nixon, he is co-director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org), series editor of the Cambridge University Press series Elements in Beckett Studies and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Beckett Studies. He edited The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (2015). His publications include Textual Awareness (2004), Modern Manuscripts (2014), Samuel Beckett’s Library (2013, with Mark Nixon), James Joyce’s “Work in Progress” (2016) and several genetic editions in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, including the Beckett Digital Library. He (co-)authored seven volumes in the BDMP “making of” series, including those on Molloy, Malone meurt/Malone Dies, L’Innommable/The Unnamable, Krapp’s Last Tape/La Dernière Bande, En attendant Godot/Waiting for Godot and Fin de partie/Endgame.

DR PIM VERHULST is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp’s Centre for Manuscript Genetics. His articles have appeared in Variants, Genetic Joyce Studies, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and the Journal of Beckett Studies, of which he is an assistant editor, and he has also written a review essay on vol. 3 of The Letters of Samuel Beckett for the James Joyce Literary Supplement 30.1 (2016). As an editorial board member of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP), Pim has co-authored and co-edited the modules on Molloy (2017, with Magessa O’Reilly and Dirk Van Hulle), Malone meurt/Malone Dies and En attendant Godot/Waiting for Godot (2017, with Dirk Van Hulle). His monograph The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays is scheduled to appear in the BDMP series, co-published by University Press Antwerp and Bloomsbury, in 2019.

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Saturday, 2nd June: CHASE plenary sessions

Dist Prof Daniel Gunn (The American University of Paris) “Beckett’s Letters: The Edition and the Corpus” Now that the task of editing a selection of Beckett’s letters is complete, now that these letters are in the world in a form their author could hardly have imagined, it is perhaps not inappropriate to ask what place they have—the edition and behind that the corpus—in their author’s œuvre.

In suggesting some possible answers to that question, I shall first examine the relation of the letters to Beckett’s published texts. In what ways are letters part of the œuvre, and in what ways are they distinct from it? How different are the sorts of readers implied by Beckett’s published texts from those implied by his letters? How does Beckett himself address the differences between the two types of writing? How does our awareness of the letters change our consideration of the œuvre?

In a second move, I’ll explore what work remains to be done—it is considerable—to bring Beckett the letter-writer even more sharply into focus than was achieved in our edition. I’ll consider certain of the steps involved in the preparation of the edition—gathering, transcription, translation, annotation, selection—in an attempt to see how these may have inflected the living reality of Beckett as a letter-writer. Perhaps inevitably, given my decades-long involvement with the letters, working sometimes in contact with those to whom they were addressed, this will be a rather personal attempt to place the letters, and to suggest some of what they may have to offer to the future of Beckett studies. DIST PROF DANIEL GUNN is a novelist, critic, and translator, as well as being one of the editors of the four-volume collection The Letters of Samuel Beckett (Cambridge University Press, 2009-16) and the editor of “The Cahiers Series” (Sylph Editions). He is the author of Psychoanalysis and Fiction (1990), the novels Almost You (1994) and The Emperor of Ice-Cream (2014), and of the memoir Wool-Gathering of How I Ended Analysis (2002). He is distinguished professor of comparative literature and English at The American University of Paris, where he directs the Center for Writers & Translators. He was designated in 2017 as editor of Muriel Spark’s letters. The keynote will be followed by a roundtable on “Editing the Letters of Samuel Beckett”, chaired by Dr Derval Tubridy, with Prof George Craig, Dist Prof Daniel Gunn, and Dr Lois M. Overbeck.

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Friday, 1st June, and Saturday, 2nd June: Panel sessions

Dr Sarah Bennett (Oriel College, University of Oxford) “Reconstructing Sam and Denis: Lost Letters in Beckett and Devlin’s Correspondence” While no surviving letters between Samuel Beckett and Denis Devlin have been identified, their independent correspondence in the 1930s, in particular the letters to Thomas MacGreevy, reveal that a correspondence between the two did in fact exist. They spent time together when both living in Dublin in 1933-34, having recently returned from Paris, and lunched in the late 1930s when their increasingly international professional lives allowed. They were readers and supporters of one another’s early work, Beckett steeling Devlin in the long delay over the publication of his first solo volume Intercessions (1937) with George Reavey’s Europa Press, and Devlin appreciating the manuscript of Murphy as Reavey struggled to find it a publisher. Devlin’s mother thought twice about sending her youngest son to Trinity after reading Beckett’s banned collection More Pricks than Kicks (1935), presumably on Devlin’s recommendation. Beckett and Devlin’s separate correspondence with MacGreevy reveals the critical judgements and divergent intellectual priorities which they did not disclose in their friendship or published work. After Beckett trumpeted the poems that would make up Intercessions with the claim that Devlin and Coffey were “without question the most interesting of the youngest generation of Irish poets”, he found the published volume a disappointment. Devlin saw Beckett as a John the Baptist figure in modern Irish poetry, and claimed to have grown tired of the “exquisite shock of contradictions” he identified in Beckett’s work. This paper will show how a complicated literary friendship and a missing correspondence can be reconstructed from a wider correspondence, using Beckett’s letters and the surrounding editorial material in the Cambridge edition, and the as-yet-unpublished letters of Devlin. DR SARAH BENNETT is lecturer in English at Oriel College, University of Oxford. Her research has encompassed transatlantic influence in twentieth-century Irish poetry, and modernist and experimental poetic traditions in Ireland. She has published various articles and reviews on modern and contemporary Irish literature. She is currently working on an edition of the letters of Denis Devlin. Prof George Craig (University of Sussex) “Ageing with Beckett” My work on Beckett, while obviously concerned with linguistic, literary and biographical aspects of his work, became increasingly involved in and with my own life, especially in the later years, as Beckett’s ageing overlapped with my own. I noted what was happening to him (how could I not?), but more was at issue than interest: I was often in tears. My concern here is to be faithful to both strands of the experience. PROF GEORGE CRAIG, born and educated in Ireland (1931+), retired from teaching French in the University of Sussex in 1996. He worked on editing and translating Beckett’s letters in French from 1998 to 2016. Prof Garin Dowd (University of West London) “Addressing Beckett’s Holes: Epistolary Equivocacy in Volume 2 of the Letters” My exploration of Beckett’s epistolary territories, evoked and mapped by the second volume of his letters, is organised by two main tropes. First I use the second volume to consider Samuel Beckett in a specific territorial location—that of post-war France—and within a specific time-frame—that of the major works, including the major works for stage and the “Trilogy”. Not

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alone are Beckett’s locations of major significance to an understanding of his work in this period; they are also central to an appreciation of the evolution of his work and in particular the part played by his bilingualism and the repudiation of English inaugurated as the Second World War came to its close (this provides the second orientating idea). In the course of an examination of the correspondence in the context of both geographical and critical territories, it is my contention that the contents of the volume demand an approach marked by what I have called, borrowing from Vincent Kauffman, l’équivoque épistolaire, or epistolary equivocacy. PROF GARIN DOWD teaches film, literature and media at the University of West London. He is the author of Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari (Rodopi, 2007), co-author (with Fergus Daly) of Leos Carax (Manchester University Press, 2003), co-editor (with Lesley Stevenson and Jeremy Strong) of Genre Matters: Essays in Theory and Criticism (Intellect Books, 2006). His most recent publications include a co-edited volume (with Natalia Rulyova) entitled Genre Trajectories: Identifying, Mapping, Projecting (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and book chapters in Ardoin, Gontarksi and Mattison (eds.), Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2014); Buchanan, Matts and Tynan (eds.), Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature (Bloomsbury, 2015); and Wilmer and Žukauskaité (eds.), Deleuze and Beckett (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). His work has been published in the journals Angelaki, Australian Journal of French Studies, Deleuze Studies, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Journal of Beckett Studies, New Review of Film and Television Studies and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui. Prof Jean-Michel Gouvard (University Bordeaux-Montaigne) “Corresponding with Beckett in French” The Letters of Samuel Beckett are published in France by Gallimard, in the well-known “Collection Blanche”. I would like to compare the French and English editions in order to show that, even if the reader is provided with the same documents, several editorial choices in the French edition contribute to offer a different picture of Beckett—what I might call a French or a “Frenchified” Beckett.

Concerning mediation, the fact that The Letters of Samuel Beckett are not published in France neither by a university press, as it is the case in the UK, nor by the traditional publisher of Samuel Beckett’s works, Les Éditions de Minuit, but by the well-known French publishing house Gallimard, has unexpected consequences, consecrating Beckett as a more canonical and reputable writer, as I will show by analyzing the book reviews. Moreover, I will suggest that the impact of the “Gallimarisation” of Beckett has been enhanced by his integration in the sub-collection “Lettres et Correspondances”, which is part of the “Collection Blanche” and in which are gathered several correspondences between writers, intellectuals and, sometimes, their lovers.

If we examine the translation of Beckett’s letters, the main problem is that the publisher, not being an academic publisher and therefore targeting a general audience, decided to translate in French all the letters written in a foreign language without providing the original texts. Such a choice contribute to “Frenchify” Beckett, as it disregards that Beckett was constantly switching between languages, and it leads to put on the same level letters authored by Beckett and translations made by André Topia, in the first two volumes, and by Gérard Kahn, in the last two volumes. By focusing on specific words and sentences, I will demonstrate that we are in the presence of at least two ways of writing in French here, on the one hand Beckett’s and on the other the translator’s, and that the matter is further complicated by the discrepancies between the two translators’ renderings of Beckett’s languages other than French.

To sum up, even if the French edition of the letters offers a fascinating set of information, it also contributes to further integrate Samuel Beckett in the French literary pantheon, offering an image of the writer in which not only his “Irishness” but also his European culture are partially homogenised. PROF JEAN-MICHEL GOUVARD teaches French literature at the University Bordeaux-Montaigne, in France, specialising in modern literature from Baudelaire to Beckett. He has been the co-organiser (with Dr Dominic Glynn)

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of Performing Beckett/Jouer Beckett (Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London) in March and October 2017 (https://jmgouvard.wixsite.com/performingbeckett). He is the author of “Capitale de la douleur” de Paul Éluard. Formes de la poésie/poésie des formes (Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2013), of the dossier on Charles Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris (Ellipses, 2014), and is currently working on a book provisionally titled Lire Beckett. He has papers on Samuel Beckett forthcoming this year in the Journal of Romance Studies (“Beckett and Propaganda Posters: A New Source for Waiting for Godot”) and in Essays in French Literature and Culture (“Watt de Samuel Beckett et la France des années 1940”). Further details can be found at: https://jmgouvard.wixsite.com/gouvard Dr Scott Eric Hamilton (University College Dublin) “Literary Atrefacts/Artefacts of Literature: The Archaeology of Beckett’s Canon(s)” Archeology investigates artefacts to gain further knowledge of the culture that produced it. However, archaeologists will attest to the fact that examining discarded relics of a past culture is essentially analyzing historical rubbish. An issue connected to such relics relates to establishing an empirical chronology of influence and development. Archaeologist Gavin Lucas attempts to reconcile this issue by positing that different chronologies intersect with a given artefact. The converging chronologies within any historical item from an inaccessible culture, then, renders the intended representation of that artefact inherently elusive and problematic. Similarly, establishing intersections between archival materials and a published literary canon can prove overly reductive for examining an author’s aesthetic, potentially conflating private autobiographical expression with public authorial autonomy. Drawing on the logic and physics of sound (regarding resonance, reverberation, and echo specifically), this paper will approach the “Grey Canon” materials as artefacts disconnected, and in a way discarded, from the context which produced them. The logic of sound is concerned with audible resonance in various forms of relation to the production of the initial sound. For example, reverberations and echoes are distorted and decayed versions of the original resonation. Much like artefacts, reverberations and echoes are supplementary to the original resonation. Understanding how artefacts reverberate in both the past and the present provides an alternative to the issues of chronology and representation which Lucas identifies. Likewise, the archival relic can be understood as reverberating to various degrees within a literary text without constricting alternative lines of literary analysis. Investigating the contribution of the letters to scholarly examination of the published corpus through this theoretical framework offers insight on how the epistolary (as curated artefacts) can generate valuable research without risking to negate Beckett’s “intent of undoing”. DR SCOTT ERIC HAMILTON is an instructor of academic writing at University College Dublin. He also lectures on literature and provides academic advice for student of the UCD School of English, Drama, Film, and Creative Writing. He has publications on Samuel Beckett in various peer-reviewed journals and is co-editor of the volume Samuel Beckett and the “State” of Ireland. Scott’s current research project, entitled Beckett’s Excavatory Aesthetic, focuses on archaeology, landscape, and time in Beckett’s work. Alicia Byrne Keane (Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin) “‘Vaguening’ Then and Now: Beckett, Murakami, and Correspondence in the Age of Globalised Literature” Beside certain passages of the manuscript of Happy Days, Samuel Beckett has written the self-instruction: “vaguen it” (qtd. in Gordon S. Armstrong, Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 50). Such “vagueness” is notable in Beckett’s correspondence—he is known for his at times uncompromising attitude to issues such as collaboration, translation by others, and explaining the meaning behind his work. However,

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Beckett’s letters have revealed that, contrary to popular opinion, he is just as often obliging on these matters.

What can Beckett’s letters tell us about changing conceptions of the contemporary author as public figure? Is authorial “mystery” still possible in the Internet age?

Both Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami are widely renowned on an international scale, their work much-translated; both authors have interesting histories with correspondence. When Beckett embarked on his literary career, Joyce had not long before described the author figure as “invisible”, “refined out of existence” (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. John Paul Riquelme, New York: Norton, 189). Writers of contemporary globalised literature such as Murakami could be considered the opposite extreme.

Murakami enjoys a “celebrity translator” status in Japan; at one point he set up a personal website to correspond with his fans. The author is no longer an isolated figure, as online communication and globalised literary markets create a more fluid atmosphere in terms of revisions and adaptations. As Emily Apter notes, “location has become somewhat meaningless as the work of artists, writers, and thinkers is dispatched […] instantly to electronic sites” (Translation Zones, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, 99). What can Beckett’s letters teach us about translated literature in the age of globalisation?

Beckett’s correspondence is a remarkable resource. His letters display an obliging transparency while maintaining a certain “vagueness”: they provide valuable insight into how issues surrounding translation can be addressed in a modern day context. By comparing Beckett and Murakami, this presentation will offer commentary on audience relations in the age of globalised literature. ALICIA BYRNE KEANE is a first-year PhD student at Trinity College Dublin, studying translated literature with reference to Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami. Her research brings together such diverse topics as Beckett studies, Japanese studies, literary translation, modernist literature, and contemporary popular fiction. She holds a first-class honours degree in English literature and French from TCD, and an MSt in English literature 1900-present from Oxford University. She is also a spoken word poet and has performed at festivals such as “Electric Picnic” and “Body&Soul”. She has written one collection of poems. Ioanna Kostopoulou (Humboldt University of Berlin) “Translation, Self-Translation and Emerging Poetics: Samuel Beckett’s Correspondence in French (1941-56)” In the immediate post-war years, Beckett’s writing is shaped by his use of French. What is known as the chosen language for his literary work is also unsurprisingly the language of the majority of his correspondence in the period 1941-56.

This particular proficiency in French can be seen as a result of increasing confidence and everyday contact with “standard” French; it relies also on a deeper connection with other (French-speaking) writers and thinkers, made possible by epistolary-based friendship and trust. On the other hand, moments of “invented” French and the development of different epistolary styles hint at a process of translation, self-translation and the emerging of poetics in the letters and literary works—such as the “Trilogy”—alike.

Bearing Beckett’s words to Simone de Beauvoir in mind—“You are giving me the chance to speak only to retract it before the words have had time to mean anything” (25 September 1946; LSB 2, 42)—the letters seem to reveal poetological decisions on when to start or end a text as well as conditions for speech and its (im)possibilities of meaning production.

The correspondence with art critic Georges Duthuit reveals Beckett’s thoughts on translation and documents the struggle with the “burden”, but also the necessity of self-translation into English. At the same time, Beckett’s encounter with Henri Michaux’s prose

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poetry raises the question of translation as influence, corresponding in a metaphorical sense and Übertragung crucial for Beckett’s (literary) writing in the years after Transition, Forty-Eight, No. 4.

This paper aims to locate, in the exchange of concepts, (un)words and views on art, a possible correspondence with Beckett’s translation practice of around 1948 and the conditions under which notions of speech, language and silence flow into novels such as L’Innommable, or in Textes pour rien. IOANNA KOSTOPOULOU is an MA student in European literatures with a specialisation in modern literature and ancient Greek at Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research interests include: Greek antiquity and German literature, science and fiction, bureaucracy and literature, theory and practice of translation, correspondence(s) between French and Greek surrealists, Samuel Beckett’s prose in Arabic translation. Her teaching interests include: short stories (international literature in English), modern Greek literature (conducted in German and/or Greek). More specifically, her work examines the poetics of contingency in pre-modern and modern literature, Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles’ plays, Franz Kafka’s “Office Writings”. She is currently translating Greek surrealist poetry into German and is working on speech act/silence in Samuel Beckett’s L’Innommable/The Unnamable for her MA thesis. Dr Jooyeup Lee (University of Reading) “The Unique Authorial Focus in the Development of Genetic Studies of Beckett’s Works” This presentation aims to offer a brief outline of how genetic criticism, that is to say the critical investigation of the writing act, has been developing in Beckett studies since their beginning in the 1960s, and to discern its uniquely authorial character if compared with genetic research focusing on the works of Joyce and Proust. As opposed to the latter cases, where genetic inquiries began well after the authors’ deaths and so had to be based on material evidence only, genetic Beckett criticism, in its early developments, overlapped with the celebrated last years in the author’s career, and came thus to be fundamentally shaped by a strong authorial focus. A brief investigation into various circumstances relating to such a development will also be presented.

Since the beginning of Beckett studies, archival materials tended to be employed for illustrative purposes, with the awareness of its importance gradually increasing, owing to improvements in the discovery, cataloguing and coverage of the materials over time. But genetic inquiries into Beckett’s works achieved a higher standard around the end of the 1980s, when the author died and the Beckett International Foundation was established in Reading. The well-known Reading scholar James Knowlson has not only been instrumental as a founder of important institutions, but as an author has also been paradigmatic in showing how to treat archival material, as proven by his biography of Beckett and by his editions of Beckett’s theatrical notebooks. His approach has been the most prominent until the emergence of more sophisticated work, produced by the following generation of scholars in the 2000s. DR JOOYEUP LEE grew up in South Korea and has worked on his PhD dissertation in Reading, titling it A History of Genetic Criticism in the Works of Samuel Beckett: The Authorial, the Textual and the Contextual. Having loudly survived his viva in January, he is quietly correcting his thesis back in South Korea. His research interests include Samuel Beckett, poetics, literary modernism, modernist art and architecture, genetic criticism, French literature and comparative literature. Kevin Lucas (Emory University) “Letters Not About Beckett: Formalism and Potential Literaryness of Letters” The Russian Formalists championed literariness, defining the term as the dimension of a text that confounds direct communication. Letters, so often concerned with practical concerns, would thus seem to be among the least literary of genres. Viktor Shklovsky showed particular interest in

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the status of letters, seeking with his characteristic avant-garde bravura to find the literary in the least likely of places. However, Shklovsky finds in the less-mediated character of intimate correspondence neither pure meaning nor art’s pure form. Letters exist in a state of potential literariness whose realisation depends on the retreat of the sender, recipient, and the context that unites the two.

Shklovsky activates this potential literariness of his own letters with Elsa Triolet. His epistolary novel Zoo, or, Letters Not About Love is largely composed of real correspondence. Shklovsky explains that he has added an artificial “motivation” to the letters which transforms this motley collection of political complaints, artistic theories, and gossip into literary art: the young woman has grown tired of her suitor and will only continue the correspondence if he vows to no longer speak of love. Assuming that the letters’ literal meanings are mere pretext, the reader explores unrequited love that remains unknown and unsaid; represented as an absence that has no positive character but yet, like art itself, influences all that comes into contact with it. The explicit messages of the letters now seem secondary to the strange pleasure of interpretative reading.

As a fellow at the Letters of Samuel Beckett Project, I have spent many hours contextualising and categorising the letters to make them digitally searchable. At times, it seems my work aims to eradicate their literary polysemy: such a task would be regrettable if only it were possible. Not yet literature but no longer practical communication, the letters currently exist as material with latent literariness, awaiting the imposition of an outside “motivation” that activates their aesthetic dimensions. My paper will conclude to discuss how various scholars, actors, authors, and even the editors of The Letters of Samuel Beckett have productively imposed their own motivations on these letters. Just as the fictive imposition of love’s prohibition transformed Shklovsky’s disjointed letters into a negative theology of the topic, motivating Beckett’s letters in new ways surprisingly produces productive relations back to the author. These practices estrange the familiar figure of Beckett, making the author once again available to new perceptions rather than mechanical recognition as Shklovsky’s theory of defamiliarisation can help explain. KEVIN LUCAS is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University. For the last four years, Kevin has served as a fellow at the Letters of Samuel Beckett Project, assuming various roles in the publication of volumes 3 and 4, as well as the current database project. His dissertation examines figures of mastery and servitude in twentieth-century theatre and political thought. Robert Patrick Murtagh (Independent) “Samuel Beckett and Fernando Arrabal in Spain” The aim of this paper is to explore the nexus between Samuel Beckett and Spanish dramatist Fernando Arrabal with a view to explaining why the former is considered a marginal playwright in Spain. The only contemporary Spaniard to be included by Martin Esslin in his seminal text The Theatre of the Absurd, Arrabal is crucial to understanding the reception of absurdism (and, I submit, Beckett) in Spain. Moving beyond a matter of shared aesthetics, however, as Beckett himself acknowledged in a letter to Con Levanthal, “Arrabal is more than a disciple” (3 February 1959; LSB 3, 194). Indeed, their relationship would lead Beckett to intervene politically on Arrabal’s behalf (following his arrest on counts of blasphemy and treason against Franco’s government, having allegedly inscribed one of his books with “Me cago en Dios, en la patria, y en todo lo demás” for a fan) leaving behind an historic epistle that is testament not only to their friendship, but a document, for all its merits, that would appear to have helped seal the fate of absurdism in Spain, given that Beckett and Arrabal, in effect, remain personae non gratae to this day. Perhaps not until both are vindicated will their sentence be finally lifted.

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ROBERT PATRICK MURTAGH is an independent researcher. He graduated with a first-class honours bachelor of arts international degree from University College Dublin, majoring in Spanish with a minor in English. He was awarded the bachelor of arts Ad Astra scholarship in the 2011/12 academic session. He holds a master’s degree of modern English literature from the University of Edinburgh. His research interests are located in the field of modern literature with an emphasis on the work of Samuel Beckett, his reception in Spain, and translation studies. Dr Anthony Paraskeva (University of Roehampton) “Post-War Cinema and Its Contexts in Beckett’s Letters” This paper will consider the uses and limits of Beckett’s recently published letters, with a particular focus on references to his film-going and his contact and complicity with post-war film culture and its attendant networks. He was clearly aware of the “young cinéastes”, as he called the incipient Nouvelle Vague, in a letter to John Manning dated 15 October 1959 (LSB 3, 246). The letters include references, for instance, to Resnais, Rogosin, Godard, and indicate his correspondence with figures such as Richard Roud and Sydney Meyers. What also emerges from the letters is a sense of Beckett’s reliance on friends, collaborators, directors and technicians who were “in the swim” as regards contemporary film culture. Yet while the letters clearly indicate regular habits of film-going from the Thirties to the Fifties, they do not offer a comprehensive guide. Beckett’s letters, after the international success of Waiting for Godot, and then, years later, when he begun his career as a director, are characterised by a general reluctance to discuss or even mention his “private appreciations”, and this, I would argue, reinforces his work’s resistance to neat categories and contexts. DR ANTHONY PARASKEVA is senior lecturer in English at the University of Roehampton and is the author of The Speech-Gesture Complex: Modernism, Theatre, Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and Samuel Beckett and Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2017). Dr Aba-Carina Pârlog (West University of Timişoara) “Rhetorical Correspondence: Beckett’s Absurdism and Its Critical Perception” The absurd dimension present in Samuel Beckett’s prose takes on a new form of expression in his drama. His personal psychological problems are only given glimpses of in his literary works. The intricacy of the details woven in the material of his stories can allow the reader to only speculate how far the famous author went with his negotiation of privacy when it came to his creative end products.

His well-known interest in Carl Jung and his theories about human consciousness and its areas blooms behind his work revealing, as a source of inspiration, his complex struggle with daily trivia, his tormenting relationships with women and his own requirements about perfect dramatic representation. Behind his absurd literature, his self-statements are mathematically sketched so that he may achieve his minimalistically constrained purpose.

This form of dense rhetorical correspondence finds its unnecessary answer in the theories, explanations and questions formulated by literary critics. His paradoxically evasive conversations show strands of philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc. theories which he combines with his own queries about existence and various aspects of life connected under the philosophical trend bearing its name.

As the writer himself explained, his drama had a therapeutic role in his case, because his depression had taken over at the time and he needed a funny distraction. Playing games with words helped him turn to postmodern literature and thus, he contributed to the evolution of worldwide literature. The gapping correspondence between the writer and critics makes one aware of an all too necessary dialogue which only manifests itself under the form of literary or theoretical statements whose interaction is suspended by the changing effect of time.

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DR ABA-CARINA PÂRLOG is specialised in British literature. As a senior lecturer she has been teaching courses of literature and translation studies for more than seventeen years being a member of the English Department, Faculty of Letters, History and Theology, West University of Timişoara, Romania. She is the author of the books The Maelstrom of Postmodernity: Language, Aesthetics and Imagination (2017), Translation and Literature: An Interdisciplinary Approach (2014), Harbingers and Agents of Postmodern Literature (2011), The Clash between Body and Mind: Orwell, Beckett and Durrell (2006), etc. She has published thirty-five articles in journals and volumes at home and abroad. Stefano Rosignoli (Trinity College Dublin) “Traces of Absolute Subjectivity in Samuel Beckett’s Letters and Reading Notes from the Thirties” The declaration of intent opening The Shape of Chaos, by David Hesla (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971)—a title modelled on Beckett’s aesthetic ideal of “a form that accommodates the mess” (SB to Tom Driver, n.d. [1961]), and therefore hastily catching Beckett’s attention (SB to David Hesla, 24 December 1970; LSB 4, 243)—presented in a nutshell Hesla’s conviction of the underlying bond between exploration of human consciousness and concern for the problem of being in Beckett’s œuvre. Hesla’s enquiry was made from a specific angle: he saw Beckett’s work, in its attempt to challenge the tradition stemming from the Parmenidean “principle that Cosmos and Logos are congruent with each other” (8-9), as permeated by the opposite perception that “man is not congruous with the conditions—the only conditions—provided for his existence” (8). This existentialist key of interpretation might have been at least partially influenced by the philosophical vogues of the decade, and archival research at the time was also affected by restrictions on exogenetic evidence available—although in any case Hesla explicitly refused “to lay hands on manuscripts which Beckett has refrained from publishing” (v). However, Hesla’s focus on the persistent bond between ontology and philosophical psychology in Beckett’s work, as a matter of fact, has been confirmed both by the so-called “Interwar Notes”, which have received so much scholarly attention in recent years, as well as by the correspondence exchanged between Beckett and his literary contacts in the Thirties. This presentation aims to introduce an ongoing research on Beckett’s treatment of the self, with the conviction that its substantialisation into an absolute self was not only at the heart of Beckett’s modernism, underlying the decline of human self-consciousness in his characters—as Hesla convincingly argued—but also that it determined the development of a Beckettian ethics. STEFANO ROSIGNOLI received an MA in modern literature (2006) and an MPhil in publishing studies (2008) from the University of Bologna. He has worked in publishing for years while beginning his PhD in English, which he is completing at Trinity College Dublin. His main areas of interest are twentieth-century Irish literature in English and moral philosophy. Stefano has co-edited (with Mark Byron) a dossier on “Beckett and the Middle Ages”, published in the celebratory issue marking the 40th anniversary of the Journal of Beckett Studies (25.1). More recently, he has authored a chapter on Beckett, copyright and moral rights in Samuel Beckett and BBC Radio: A Reassessment (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). He co-convenes seminars on James Joyce and Samuel Beckett; teaches modern literature and theory at Trinity College and University College, in Dublin; and serves as review editor for Variants: The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship. He can be contacted at rosignos@tcd.ie. Dr Rodney X. Sharkey (Weill Cornell Medical College, Qatar) “No Academic Value Where None Intended: A Personal Recollection of Transcribing Beckett’s Letters to MacGreevy” Rodney Sharkey will undertake a Rabelaisian journey through his four years transcribing Beckett’s letters, which will include love, death, loss, redemption, threatened legal action, damaged eye sight, microfilm swapped in the streets of Paris, and, finally, an understanding of what it means to write and post a letter to a friend, now as then.

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DR RODNEY SHARKEY currently teaches humanities at the Doha branch campus of the Cornell University Medical College. He has published on Beckett in the Journal of Beckett Studies, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, The Beckett Circle and elsewhere. He assisted Tony Cronin on his biography of Beckett; an experience from which today’s paper derives. Federica Signorini (Emory University) “Love, Beckett: Reading the Addresser/Addressee in the Age of Digitisation” As the Letters of Samuel Beckett Project enters a phase of digitisation, questions that began as a murmur in the print publication have become louder. These questions relate to what it means to use Beckett’s letters as source material for the creation of a digital index—a living archive that will come to guide research efforts. While Beckett authorised the publication of letters that had bearing on his work, what happens to our understanding of authorship, intentionality and the addresser/addressee when instead we read Beckett’s letters through his works? How can we read the letters that have a named addresser/addressee through and with Beckett’s œuvre as a textual space of destabilised meaning, a voice speaking out through and into the void? Furthermore, how does this reading impact our approach to the digital index created out of them? I suggest a reading of the letters that at once allows for the creation of a digital index but also engages with the stabilisation of meaning that make its creation possible. To guide this discussion, I will use Lyotard’s notion of the phrase universe and the affect phrase to argue that Beckett’s letters offer the potential of play between these two notions. This dynamic in turn destabilises any plenitude or negation of the four constitutive poles of the phrase that are negated in the affect phrase: its addresser, its addressee, its referent, and its meaning. There is a gesture of stabilising these four poles in the putting together of a digital index, where allusions must be traced and nicknames deciphered. The gesture of making the letters public suggests an acknowledgement that these letters can be read by those who are not the intended addressee. Furthermore, the act of writing the letter creates a potential for the destabilisation of how notions of addresser/addressee are understood. With this in mind, Beckett’s letters offer an opportunity to critically engage with notions of address and the impacts it has on digitisation. FEDERICA SIGNORINI is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University. She completed her masters at the University of Manchester, in the UK. This year she has begun work as a research assistant at the Letters of Samuel Beckett Project. Federica’s work focuses on the limits of the human and the construction of modern subjectivity through critical engagement with psychoanalysis, deconstruction, eco-criticism and queer theory. Dr Derval Tubridy (Goldsmiths, University of London) “‘[P]rotected against words’: Beckett, the Epistolary, and Art Writing” On 28 October 1948 Georges Duthuit sent Beckett an article by Blanchot, to which Beckett responded: “Yes, protected against words, but working its way in among them at moments, what goes on between us is safe from attack. The rest hardly matters” (LSB 2, 107). At this time Beckett was working on what would become “Three Dialogues”, published in Transition, Forty-Nine, No. 5, in 1949. Derval Tubridy’s paper explores the ways in which Beckett’s engagement with the epistolary informed the development of his aesthetics. It draws on Maurice Blanchot and Jean-François Lyotard to trace the implications of Beckett’s art writing in, for example, “Les Deux Besoins” and the “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit” for the development of what she argues is the “generating gesture” implicit in contemporary art. DR DERVAL TUBRIDY is senior lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co-director of the London Beckett Seminar at the School of Advanced Study, University

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of London. She works on modern and contemporary literature, performance and the visual arts with a particular focus on the intersections between language, materiality and process. Recent publications on Beckett include articles in the Journal of Beckett Studies and Contemporary Theatre Review, chapters in Staging Beckett in Great Britain and in Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art, and the monograph Samuel Beckett: The Language of Subjectivity (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She can be contacted at d.tubridy@gold.ac.uk. Dr Andy Wimbush (Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge) “A Sufferer of My Pains: Beckett’s Letters and Reading Murphy as Autobiography” On 10 March 1935, Beckett wrote what has become a much-discussed letter to Thomas MacGreevy (LSB 1, 256-64). Here Beckett responded to his friend’s recommendation that he might take a look at The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis in order to seek some solace for the panic attacks and heart palpitations that had afflicted him for the best part of a decade. Beckett replied that all he was able to get from the text was a rather “baroque solipsism” and an “abject self-referring quietism”. It was shortly after writing this letter that Beckett began work on Murphy: the story of a “seedy solipsist” with a fondness for quietitude. This paper will argue that Beckett’s letters from this period can yield yet more clues as to the relationship between the author and the character he later called a “vice-exister”. In particular, it will examine a letter in which Beckett expresses concerns about having made “the Aliosha mistake” with Murphy and his use of the Sanskrit expression tat twam asi in discussing the character (SB to Thomas MacGreevy, 7 July 1936; LSB 1, 349-55). The paper will propose that these references, to Dostoevsky and Schopenhauer respectively, show how Beckett struggled to navigate a path between his need for a quietistic aesthetic in his fiction and his misgivings about the adoption of quietism as a way of living. DR ANDY WIMBUSH teaches twentieth-century and contemporary literature at the Institute of Continuing Education at the University of Cambridge. He has published work on Beckett’s fiction and its relationship to religion, ecology, ethics, and literary influence in the Journal of Beckett Studies, Literature and Theology and several academic books. He holds a BA and a PhD in English from the University of Cambridge. Dr Nick Wolterman (Independent) “Beckett’s Epistolary Manifestos: Something or Nothing?” This paper responds to a critical tendency to treat Beckett’s letters’ most rhetorically forceful statements of his artistic ambitions as expressions of a singular vision underlying large swathes of his canon as a whole. The paper argues that as letters, these texts highlight the importance of the occasion of writing in a way that casts Beckett’s vision as a continual, dim registering of that which makes itself apparent in the moment, as an ongoing interaction between a general authorial disposition and an ever-changing array of ideas and texts that happen to be at the forefront of the author’s mind. It makes this argument through offering some new contexts in which to understand Beckett’s famous “German letter” to Axel Kaun (9 July 1937; LSB 1, 512-21), which explores paradoxical ideas about the relations between language, things, and nothingness in ways that resonate with ideas toyed with in one of the best-known poems of Joachim Ringelnatz, a discussion of whose work provides the springboard for Beckett’s own reflections. Ringelnatz’s “Ich habe dich so lieb” would likely have caught Beckett’s attention and influenced the course of his ideas in his letter to Kaun, especially in light of the fact that it deploys imagery that is strikingly similar to the imagery deployed in one of the manifesto-like statements Beckett had included in Dream of Fair to Middling Women. This passage in Dream was itself likely influenced by Tristan Tzara’s manifestos, to which Beckett was exposed while writing his novel, and particularly by their mix of the sincere and the comical, the profound and the nonsensical. Ringelnatz’s work is also marked by simultaneous sincerity and playfulness, and

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these tonal resonances suggest a further reading of the German letter alongside letters that one of Beckett’s favorite Dadaists, Marcel Duchamp, wrote to the avant-garde magazine The Blind Man—letters in which Duchamp articulates his artistic ambitions in ways that, like Tzara’s manifestos and Ringelnatz’s poems, are simultaneously serious and clownish. The paper concludes that the German letter is marked by similar tonal ambiguities as it borrows images and ideas from numerous sources, which leaves the letter’s relation to Beckett’s later work indeterminate. What this exemplifies is that, if there is such a thing as a constant Beckettian vision, it is only a general proclivity for deliberate, continual self-contradiction. The specific ideas he puts forth about artistic expression are far more difficult to disembed from complex webs of context-specific considerations. DR NICK WOLTERMAN is an independent scholar who recently completed a PhD at the University of York. His thesis shows how Beckett’s ideas about artistic expression and reception vacillate over the course of his career in ways that respond to contemporaneous debates and changing imagined audiences. He currently serves as freelance editorial staff for the interdisciplinary journal Modernism/modernity, and he continues research into Beckett’s work, literary modernism, theories of interpretation, and relations between Anglophone and Germanophone versions of major modernist works.

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Academic Organisers

Dr Derval Tubridy, Goldsmiths, University of London DR DERVAL TUBRIDY is senior lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co-director of the London Beckett Seminar at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She works on modern and contemporary literature, performance and the visual arts with a particular focus on the intersections between language, materiality and process. Recent publications on Beckett include articles in the Journal of Beckett Studies and Contemporary Theatre Review, chapters in Staging Beckett in Great Britain and in Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art, and the monograph Samuel Beckett: The Language of Subjectivity (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She can be contacted at d.tubridy@gold.ac.uk. Stefano Rosignoli, Trinity College Dublin STEFANO ROSIGNOLI received an MA in modern literature (2006) and an MPhil in publishing studies (2008) from the University of Bologna. He has worked in publishing for years while beginning his PhD in English, which he is completing at Trinity College Dublin. His main areas of interest are twentieth-century Irish literature in English and moral philosophy. Stefano has co-edited (with Mark Byron) a dossier on “Beckett and the Middle Ages”, published in the celebratory issue marking the 40th anniversary of the Journal of Beckett Studies (25.1). More recently, he has authored a chapter on Beckett, copyright and moral rights in Samuel Beckett and BBC Radio: A Reassessment (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). He co-convenes seminars on James Joyce and Samuel Beckett; teaches modern literature and theory at Trinity College and University College, in Dublin; and serves as review editor for Variants: The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship. He can be contacted at rosignos@tcd.ie.