2013 speakers included:
H. Porter Abbott
is Professor Emeritus in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his B.A. from Reed College, and his M.A. & Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. Published works include‘Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph’, ‘Diary Fiction: Writing as Action’, ‘On the Origin of Fictions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives’, ‘Real Mysteries: Narrative and the Unknowable’, ‘The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative’, and ‘The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect’.
Mary Bryden
is Professor of French in the Department of Modern Languages and European Studies at the University of Reading, and Vice-President of the Association of University Professors and Heads of French (AUPHF). She has published extensively on Beckett and Deleuze. Her latest book is the edited collection,Samuel Beckett and Animals (Cambridge University Press, 2013), which links Beckett’s work with prominent contemporary debates about animality. Previous books include the monographs Gilles Deleuze: Travels in Literature (Palgrave, 2007), Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God (Palgrave, 1998), Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama: Her Own Other (Palgrave, 1993), and the edited collections Beckett’s Proust/Deleuze’s Proust (Palgrave, 2009; co-ed. with Margaret Topping), Deleuze and Religion (Routledge, 2001), Samuel Beckett and Music(Oxford University Press, 1998), and The Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Beckett Archives (Beckett International Foundation, 1992; co-ed. with John Pilling). She has just completed a monograph on T E Lawrence.
Daniela Caselli
is Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester. Her research is in twentieth-century literature and culture, especially literary modernism, critical theory, and gender. She is the author of Beckett’s Dantes. Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism (Manchester University Press, 2005) and the editor of Beckett and Nothing: Trying to Understand Beckett (Manchester University Press: 2010). Her monograph on Djuna Barnes, Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes’s Bewildering Corpus, appeared in 2009. She is currently working on a British-Academy-funded project on Dante in Modernism.
Peter Fifield
is Junior Research Fellow in English at St John’s College. He is interested in twentieth-century literature and culture, particularly Modernism and its legacies. As well as literature, this covers areas including the visual arts, philosophy, and technology. He is working on a project looking at Samuel Beckett and post-war anti-literary writing in literature, philosophy and art.
Nicholas Grene
is Professor of English at Trinity College Dublin. He is one of the initiators of the M.Phil. in Anglo-Irish Literature in Trinity and is now the co-Director of its successor, the M.Phil. in Irish Writing, on which he teaches a module on Irish drama and seminars on Beckett. His main research interests are in drama, primarily on Shakespeare and modern Irish theatre, but he has also worked on Irish poetry and on Indian literature in English. He is the author of numerous books and is currently working on a book about domestic spaces in modern drama.
Jonathan Heron
is the Artistic Director of Fail Better Productions and IATL 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) andPlay 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 is a founding member of the AHRC Beckett and Brain Science working group and an active participant of the IFTR Performance-as-Research working group.
Nicholas Johnson
is Assistant Professor in Drama at Trinity College Dublin, as well as a performer, theatre 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 Wherein Sofia, Bulgaria and in the Beckett Theatre in Dublin. He is artistic director of Painted Filly Theatre and deputy director of the Samuel Beckett Summer School. His current book project is on the performance of Beckett’s prose.
Ben Keatinge
is Associate Professor at South East European University, Macedonia. He has written widely on Beckett, Deleuze, and Irish literature.
Jim Mays
is Professor Emeritus of English and American Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. He is editor of the Poetical Works volumes in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and has written on and edited a variety of modern, mainly Irish authors.
Barry McGovern
is a former member of the RTÉ Players and the Abbey Theatre Company. He has worked in theatre, film, radio and television, as well as written music for many shows, and co-written two musicals and directed plays and operas. He is known internationally for his award-winning one-man Beckett shows I’ll Go On and Watt which the Gate Theatre presented at the 1985 and 2010 Dublin Theatre Festival respectively.
Mark Nixon
is Reader 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) and the edited collection Publishing Samuel Beckett (British Library, 2011). Forthcoming books include Samuel Beckett’s Library, written with Dirk Van Hulle (Cambridge UP, 2013), and the critical edition of Beckett’s short story Echo’s Bones (Faber, 2014). He is currently preparing critical editions of Beckett’s Critical Writings (with David Tucker; Faber) and Beckett’s German Diaries (Suhrkamp), as well as The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature (with Ulrika Maude; Bloomsbury, 2015).
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.
Dirk Van Hulle
is Professor of English Literature at the University of Antwerp’s Centre for Manuscript Genetics. He is the current president of the European Society for Textual Scholarship (ESTS), a trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation and an editor of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui. With Mark Nixon, he is co-director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP) and editor in chief of the Journal of Beckett Studies. He is the author of Textual Awareness (2004), Manuscript Genetics: Joyce’s Know-How, Beckett’s Nohow (2008) and The Making of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Stirrings Still’ and ‘what is the word’ (2011). He is co-author of Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge UP, 2013) with Mark Nixon, editor of Beckett’s Company (Faber and Faber, 2011), and with Shane Weller he has co-edited a genetic edition of L’Innommable/The Unnamable (2013), the second module of the BDMP (www.beckettarchive.org). He is currently preparing a monograph onModern Manuscripts (Bloomsbury) and the second edition of the Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (Cambridge UP).
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Seminars:
Beckett and Dante: Daniela Caselli
Session 1: ‘Intertextuality versus influence’: TCD early notebooks; Dream of Fair to Middling Women
Session 2: ‘Efface the Trace!/Keep whole analogy out of sight’: Murphy and Mercier and Camier
Session 3: ‘Dejà vu infinitely beyond my reach’: the Comedy as fragment and image in the oeuvre (including Company, some late prose, and some drama (Happy Days, That Time)
Session 4: ‘Infernal Stagings: A Comedy’: How It Is
Performance workshop 2013: Jonathan Heron & Nicholas Johnson
The Samuel Beckett Summer School, in partnership with DU Players, will continue to offer a seminar focused on Beckett’s work in performance. Working in a black-box theatre 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. Co-facilitated by scholar/practitioners Jonathan Heron and Nicholas Johnson, the approach in 2013 will be the first experiment of a new “Samuel Beckett Laboratory,” in which performance is viewed not only as an end in itself, but also used as a research method. The textual focus will not be 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. Summer School students at any level of experience are welcome; interest in performance as a praxis is the sole prerequisite, and this laboratory is absolutely open to non-professionals.
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.
Reading Group: the Trilogy: 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.
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World Premiere of Pan Pan Theatre’s ‘Embers’:
As well as our programme of seminars and lectures, we were very excited to announce that the 2013 Samuel Beckett Summer School was to play sponsor to the world premiere of Beckett’s radio play ‘Embers’ by renowned Irish theatre company Pan Pan Theatre. This acclaimed company staged the production in the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College from 5th – 17th August 2013. Registration with the Summer School 2013 included your ticket to this very special ahead of its showing in the Edinburgh International Festival.
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samuel beckett summer school 