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Spectrality remains a key motif and metaphor in Beckett’s writing; many of his wandering and destitute creations seem on their way towards another kind of life, uncomfortably close to death, and remarkably close to the spirit world. This article outlines some of the paradoxes that surround Beckett’s relation to the ghost as a dramatic device; it emphasises how uneasily Beckett’s work sits within the tradition of the ghost play, and unravels some of the preoccupations and interests shaping Beckett’s treatment of dialogues with the dead.

Coming to terms with the multiple political dimensions of Beckett’s work and career is a difficult task, further complicated by the many accounts presenting his relation to politics as undeserving of critical scrutiny. Numerous friends, acquaintances, interviewers, and critics have presented him as a writer solely preoccupied about a peculiar internal world of his own making. “Almost totally nonpolitical” is Alan Astro’s phrase; “consistent in his apolitical behaviour” is Deirdre Bair’s description; “resolutely unpolitical” is Robert Brustein’s diagnosis. This chapter considers the tensions that have developed within and around this well-established consensus. It revisits the debates about Beckett that have unfolded in the theatre world since the 1950s, discusses Beckett’s own perspective on self-styled political theatre, and considers some of the many ties between Beckett’s plays and politicised areas of performance and playwriting.

Bowler hats, old boots, greatcoats, ladies’ hats, mourning dresses, beds, rocking chairs, bicycles, wheelchairs, crutches, sticks, pockets, bags, stones: these are the objects that Julie Bates situ...

Beckett's Political Imagination charts unexplored territory: it investigates how Beckett's bilingual texts re-imagine political history, and documents the conflicts and controversies through which Beckett's political consciousness and affirmations were mediated. The book offers a startling account of Beckett's work, tracing the many political causes that framed his writing, commitments, collaborations and friendships, from the Scottsboro Boys to the Black Panthers, from Irish communism to Spanish republicanism to Algerian nationalism, and from campaigns against Irish and British censorship to anti-Apartheid and international human rights movements. Emilie Morin reveals a very different writer, whose career and work were shaped by a unique exposure to international politics, an unconventional perspective on political action and secretive political engagements. The book will benefit students, researchers and readers who want to think about literary history in different ways and are interested in Beckett's enduring appeal and influence.

Celtic Tiger economics are portrayed in a distinctive fashion in Irish plays of the 1990s; in the work of Conor McPherson in particular, reminders of the uneven circulation of capital and the hegemony of the free market proliferate, remaining entwined with familiar representations of the supernatural and the unearthly. Drawing on the rich body of work published on the Gothic and occultism, this essay focuses on the metaphorisation of fears related to housing, governance, and private property in McPherson's plays and interrogates their political tenor. I read these texts against recent analyses of neoliberalism and political conservatism and show that the significance of seances, supernatural occurrences, haunted houses, and doppelgangers to McPherson's writing is in itself indicative of the difficulties encountered by the contemporary imagination when apprehending the social transformations concurrent with the rise of neoliberal economies.

William Butler Yeats is recognised as a pioneer in the history of radio broadcasting in the United Kingdom; the talks and poetry readings he conceived for the British Broadcasting Corporation between 1931 and 1938 display his genuine interest in writing for, and speaking to the wireless, and the published scripts of his broadcasts have received sustained critical attention in their own right. However, if Yeats’s collaboration with the BBC during the 1930s has been carefully explored, the periods that precede and follow the creation of his BBC broadcasts have remained shrouded in mystery. In this article, I provide a new chronology of radiophonic adaptations and broadcasts of Yeats’s writings that complements extant knowledge of this facet of broadcasting history, and I argue that Yeats’s personal involvement with radio should be envisaged in a wider context. Indeed, the artistic leeway that Yeats was granted when conceiving his BBC programmes is not merely related to his status as Nobel Prize winner, but ...

Many facets of the trilogy appeal to, and reframe, the conventions of the detective novel (Spraggins; Dearlove, 40; Kenner, 32, 35). This line of enquiry, salient in critical appraisals of Molloy, has also yielded precious insights into Beckett's early fiction; recently, Frederik Smith has read Watt as subverting the syllogistic thinking developed in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels, familiar to Beckett since his childhood. It is clear that Beckett was a keen and knowledgeable reader of detective fiction: especially during the early 1950s, "Agatha Christie whodunnits" in English and French were readings of choice, and Beckett's interest in thrillers by Christie, Edgar Wallace, Erne Stanley Garner and Rex Stout continued beyond that point (Knowlson, 390, 553, 562). He also kept abreast of the adventurous explorations of the genre published by the Editions de Minuit and manifested interest in Alain Robbe-Grillet's adaptation of the detective plot in Les Gommes (1953) (Moorjani, 232). His correspondence suggests that the writing of Malone meurt remained circumscribed by a literary universe populated by detectives, spies and mysteries awaiting resolution: writing to Georges Duthuit in 1951, Beckett deplores his inability to read popular crime novels as a measure of the taxing demands made upon his creative energies by the completion of Malone meurt and Textes pour rien. Not only is he unable to write, but he cannot even read "policier[s]" - the paperback detective novels and thrillers he was so fond of (Beckett 2011, 231).The cultural and political imaginary that fuels Beckett's post-war work remains powerfully inflected by the premises of detective fiction, as evidenced in the quest of the private investigator Camier, Moran's search for Molloy, and the humble investigations underlying Malone's stories. Beckett initially perceived these three inquests as part of the same series (2011, 80). But the detective plot is reduced to its bare bones in Malone Dies: this is, indeed, a deeply precarious context for deductive thinking, and Malone's searches, accounts and deductions, although modest in their remit, require relentless labour; even the reliability and existence of a pencil are subject to speculation. Malone tries to preclude material or linguistic imprecisions such as those that might emerge from inappropriate reasoning methods; he aspires to the arrangement of his belongings, the "unique occasion" for "a true statement at last," "to be free from all trace of approximativeness," yet acknowledges that, unlike his own, "true lives do not tolerate this excess of circumstance" (196-97). However, enigmas are too numerous to find resolution: the narrative is littered with allusions to mysterious disappearances and conspiracies masterminded by unnamed powers and institutions, which, in turn, frame the attempts of Malone and his creatures to find, identify and connect material traces, sequences of events and explainable causes.This essay examines the degree to which forms of deduction in Malone Dies are politically and historically grounded; I contend that, through its critique of the forms of determinism, concealment and normalisation upon which the exercise of deduction relies, the novel also engages post-war debates about the roles and responsibilities of state institutions. To analyse the strained relation that Malone Dies maintains to the conventions of detective fiction, as I seek to do here, is also to trace the residual bearing of specific social and political circumstances upon the novel's evocations of disappearances, deaths, searches and inquests. This reading runs against the grain of established interpretations of Malone Dies as a subtle reflection on ontology, according to the terms defined by its first lines; here, I focus on a historically-inflected text concerned about state-sanctioned persecution, whose borrowings from the discourses of detective fiction remain underpinned by the momentous debates about collaborationism and the dehiscence of the French State that are formative of its genesis as a French-language novel in 1947 (these debates, as Andrew Gibson has shown, also inform some facets of Mercier et Camier, written in 1946 (Gibson, 19-26)). …

Pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (pNETs) are the second most common pancreatic neoplasms, exhibiting a complex spectrum of clinical behaviors. To examine the clinico-pathological characteristics associated with long-term prognosis we reviewed 119 patients with pNETs treated in a tertiary referral center using the WHO 2010 grading and the American Joint Committee on Cancer/International Union Against Cancer (AJCC/UICC) staging systems, with a median follow-up of 38 months. Tumor size, immunohistochemistry (IHC) profiling and patient characteristics-determining stage were analyzed. Primary clinical outcomes were disease progression or death. The mean age at presentation was 52 years; 55% were female patients, 11% were associated with MEN1 (multiple endocrine neoplasia 1) or VHL (Von Hippel–Lindau); mean tumor diameter was 3.3 cm (standard deviation, SD) (2.92). The clinical presentation was incidental in 39% with endocrine hypersecretion syndromes in only 24% of cases. Nevertheless, endocrine hormone tissue immunoreactivity was identified in 67 (56.3%) cases. According to WHO 2010 grading, 50 (42%), 38 (31.9%), and 3 (2.5%) of tumors were low grade (G1), intermediate grade (G2), and high grade (G3), respectively. Disease progression occurred more frequently in higher WHO grades (G1: 6%, G2: 10.5%, G3: 67%, P = 0.026) and in more advanced AJCC stages (I: 2%, IV: 63%, P = 0.033). Shorter progression free survival (PFS) was noted in higher grades (G3 vs. G2; 21 vs. 144 months; P = 0.015) and in more advanced AJCC stages (stage I: 218 months, IV: 24 months, P

Many songs unsung, unheard or misheard appear in Beckett's oeuvre, from Mr Knott's monotonous and irksome singing in Watt to the ballads with which Miss McGlome greets dusk in Krapp's Last Tape. Contrary to such depictions of melody, which function as mere narrative digressions, the fragmentary songs which drift in and out of Beckett's post-war novellas crystallise particular anxieties about post-Romantic essentialisations of memory and culture, and gain new currency when considered against the history of European musical nationalisms. This article brings to light Beckett's long-standing reflection upon the elevated literary status of the folk song, folklore and translation, and, in so doing, reconfigures Beckett's post-war novellas in relation to post-Enlightenment debates about folklore in the contexts of German Romanticism and the Irish Literary Revival.

The integration into conceptual art of techniques inspired by Fluxus (the international aggregate of artists who saw indeterminacy as imaginatively and linguistically enabling) has, in turn, given rise to a specific line in British playwriting since the mid-1990s, as evidenced in plays by Martin Crimp, Sarah Kane, and Tim Crouch which gesture towards conceptual art, performance art, and the event score. In this article Emilie Morin brings to light the affinities between this artistic moment in contemporary British theatre and the international avant-garde. She discusses the shared interest of Crimp, Kane, and Crouch in indeterminacy and the fusion between artistic media, paying particular attention to Crouch's redefinition of the status of the modern artwork in his play for galleries England (2007). Critical recognition of the experimental mode in which these playwrights operate has remained subsumed under a non-specific appreciation of their relationship to conceptual art, leaving important questions of form and legacy unaddressed. Here, the proximity between this marginal trend in British playwriting and developments in experimental music and performance art exploring ideas of indeterminacy is highlighted, and the contemporary problematization of performance as event and concept is reconfigured in relation to the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Fluxus. Emilie Morin is Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York and the author of Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Her research interests lie in European modernism and the avant-garde.

It has been suggested that treatment with adequate dose titration of pegvisomant, a GH antagonist, up to a maximum of 40 mg daily, can achieve IGF-1 normalisation in virtually all patients with acromegaly. On the other hand, temozolomide (TMZ), an alkylating cytostatic agent, has been reported to reduce pituitary tumour size and hormone hypersecretion in a small number of aggressive pituitary macroadenomas. In this paper we report the case of a patient resistant to very high doses of pegvisomant used in combination with somatostatin analogs (SSA) and to TMZ therapy. The patient, initially a 22 year-old man with an invasive GH-secreting pituitary macroadenoma (IGF-1, 371% upper limit of normal), had active acromegaly despite a repeat transsphenoidal surgery followed by radiotherapy and SSA (octreotide 800 μg sc daily) (IGF-1, 262% ULN). In combination with SSA, pegvisomant was started at 20 mg daily and doses were titrated up to 60 mg daily. IGF-1 was moderately reduced and stabilized at 200% ULN after 1 year of treatment. Serum pegvisomant level was 30,500 ng/l, the denaturalized GHBP concentration 1,120 pM and the endogenous GH level was 220 μg/l. Pegvisomant was stopped and TMZ therapy was given for 5 cycles. However, the patient reported an increase of acromegaly symptoms and the serum IGF-1 was raised to the same level prior to pegvisomant therapy. Consequently, pegvisomant was tried again with doses up to 100 mg daily finally resulting in normalisation of serum IGF-1 level and improvement of acromegaly symptoms and patient well-being. We conclude that in some patients with severe acromegaly refractory to multimodal therapy, biochemical control may be difficult to attain with conventional doses of pegvisomant or TMZ therapy.

The word ‘unspeakable’ is ubiquitous in accounts of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). In this context, unspeakability works as shorthand for legal and political issues that are still deeply contested, and are indexed to the use of torture by the French army and the guerrilla war led by the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). The Algerian war had roots in colonial realities and French assimilationist aspirations — more precisely, in the tiered system of civic and voting rights that categorized the majority of Algerians as French subjects, but not French citizens, in Algeria’s distinctive administrative status as a French province, rather than a colony or a protectorate, and in the dedication of the large community of French settlers or pied-noirs to a French Algeria.1 In French public discourse, the word ‘war’, largely banished, was commonly replaced by euphemisms such as the ‘Algerian problem’, ‘counter-insurgency operations’, a ‘law-and-order problem’ or ‘pacification’, in order to avoid giving credence to the idea that a civil war was tearing the nation apart.2 The Evian Accords ending the war in 1962 did not address its obscured status but declared a moratorium on the prosecution of all acts of violence committed during the ‘events’ and opinions voiced about the ‘events’ before the 1961 referendum on Algerian self-determination.3

It may be that, in keeping with global political aspirations, the twenty-first century will become the century of human rights.1 As many voices advocate as oppose such an aspiration, and the worlds of theatre and performance are no exception: the empowering qualities of theatre have been acknowledged by many, especially in relation to vulnerable communities.2 In the wake of the human rights legislation that emerged after World War II and the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, theatre and performance artists have increasingly promoted specific human rights issues in their work and sought to establish special ties with various forms of human rights advocacy.3 The theatre artists who are connected with human rights are myriad, and some of the most celebrated include Augusto Boal (Brazil), renowned for his ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ practices; Ariel Dorfman (Argentina); Athol Fugard and Yael Farber (South Africa); Vaclav Havel (Czech Republic); Harold Pinter (Great Britain); Nawal El Sadaawi (Egypt); Farzaneh Aghaeipour (Iran); Marcie Rendon and Cherrie Moraga (United States); Mangai (India); Nighat Rizvi, Madeeha Gauhar and Shahid Nadeem (Pakistan); and Juliano Mer Khamis, who was murdered in 2011 outside his theatre in the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin, on the West Bank.

Ghosts are hard to escape in modern and contemporary culture: in film and television dramas, novels, poetry, fine art and installation — and, particularly, we argue in this book, in theatre. Much has been written about ghosts in relation to Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny,’ in which Freud describes feelings of dread and repulsion at a familiar object suddenly rendered full of alienating menace.1 For Jo Collins and John Jervis, Freud’s uncanny suggests ‘a fundamental indecision, an obscurity or uncertainty, at the heart of our ontology, our sense of time, place and history, which is unsettling, potentially terrifying and intriguing.’2 The confrontation with the uncanny has been perceived as a fundamentally modern predicament: Collins and Jervis identify the uncanny as the ‘constitutive aspect of our experience of the modern,’ while Roger Luckhurst describes the uncanny as ‘a meta-concept for modernity itself.’3

Carney complex is a genetically heterogenous multiple neoplasia syndrome. Adrenal cortical carcinoma is a rare malignancy with a poor prognosis that is not recognized to be associated with this syndrome.We report a 22-yr-old female presenting with Carney complex who developed adrenal carcinoma. The response to adjunctive therapy is also described.We performed a detailed pathology review of the adrenal tumor to examine morphologic changes, Ki-67 labeling, and p53 expression. We also performed genetic testing of candidate genes and describe the response to radiation and kinase inhibition therapy.The patient presented with an 8.5-cm adrenal mass with a MIB-1 labeling index of 20% and unequivocal angioinvasion classified as a T3NXM0 carcinoma. The nontumorous adrenal cortex revealed characteristic features of primary pigmented nodular adrenocortical disease. Genetic analysis revealed a novel PRKAR1 frame shift mutation resulting in a premature stop codon and a heterozygous p53 polymorphic substitution previously noted in other solid carcinomas. Disease recurrence in the liver showed partial response to combined stereotactic radiotherapy and sorafenib multikinase inhibition.This represents an initial characterization of a malignancy among patients with Carney complex. Our findings have implications for disease surveillance and management of individuals with this genetic syndrome.