Beckett and the Media

Conference

Over the years, Beckett Studies have undergone multiple transformations: from early existentialist approaches to post-structuralist interventions, to performance-oriented studies, and genetic criticism. The last two decades have seen a surge in scholarship that probes the relations between Beckett and media technologies. This conference brings together some of the leading scholars who have focused on the nexus between Beckett and media while opening its doors to media theorists from outside of Beckett Studies who have a strong interest in his work.

Conceiving of media in broad terms (which include technologies, devices and apparatuses, sounds, images and texts, codes and notation systems, or the voice and the body), we would like to foster an approach that grasps media as a convergence of communicational, technical and aesthetic spheres and that is attentive to media both as environments and as operations. The conference is designed to explore the importance of media in Beckett by asking questions such as:

• What are the benefits of seeing Beckett’s work in several media in their interconnectedness?
• What new insights emerge when we view Beckett’s work as an engagement with developing media technologies and, correspondingly, alternative, competing forms of communication and representation?
• How can we address the question of media plurality in Beckett’s output, and what is the significance of this plurality?
• Can we outline Beckett’s general media aesthetic relying on its literary, theatrical, radiophonic, filmic, and televisual manifestations?
• What kind of strategies (of manipulation) does Beckett employ to stage the agency of the medium?
• How does a focus on media inflect questions of memory, perception and cognition, the body, and identity formation in Beckett?
• Can we develop a specifically Beckettian conception of media?
• How innovative and how radical was Beckett as a media artist, and to what extent is he still our contemporary in his engagement with various media?

The conference aims to probe the relations between Beckett and the media on at least five levels, welcoming case studies, theorizations, and other approaches too: a) Beckett’s work in different media (film, TV plays, radio plays, vidéocassette), b) deployment of media and technologies in theatrical productions of Beckett’s texts, c) references to media in the fictional worlds of his texts, d) media-theoretical considerations of Beckett, and e) digital humanities in Beckett Studies

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