Angela Moorjani

Angela Moorjani is Professor Emerita of French and Intercultural Studies at the University of Maryland-UMBC and has been a visiting professor at Waseda University in Tokyo. She authored Abysmal Games in the Novels of Samuel Beckett in 1982 on narrative mise en abyme, the fort-da, and other playful repetitions; she has since co-edited seven volumes on Beckett, with the latest – Beckett in Conversation, “yet again” to appear in time for Beckett’s 110th birthday in 2016. Her other books on mourning and repetition in writing and the arts – The Aesthetics of Loss and Lessness and Beyond Fetishism and Other Excursions in Pragmatics – and numerous essays fuse psychoanalysis and pragmatics with gender theory. Her recent publications include a study of the trilogy in The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett and a series on Beckett’s French cultural ghosts leading her to grapple further with the clash between Beckett’s ghostly timelessness and embodied temporality in the space of writing. With Sjef Houppermans, she is co-editor in chief of the bilingual journal Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui.

Jean-Michel Rabaté

Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania and the Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities. One of the founders and curators of Slought Foundation in Philadelphia (slouhgt.org), he is a managing editor of the Journal of Modern Literature. Since 2008, he has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is currently the president of the American Samuel Beckett Studies Association. He has authored or edited more than thirty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, philosophy, and writers like Beckett, Pound and Joyce. Currently, he is completing a book on Beckett and editing an anthology on modernism and literary theory.

Summer School 2012, day one