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This article analyses the work of the twentieth-century late modernist Samuel Beckett, in light of the turn-of-the-century anti-rationalist Henri Bergson (1859-1941), and the eighteenth-century neoclassicist Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). What unites these three very different thinkers is a concern over habitual, automatic and involuntary behaviour, which in all three cases has a distinctly neurological dimension. Beckett’s writing explores the Bergsonian notion, informed by medicine and experimental psychology, of the limitations of agency, of “the deep-seated recalcitrance of matter,” and of the human as always already inflicted by the mechanical, a fact that is poignantly highlighted by the case of Samuel Johnson. Through his encounter with Johnson, Beckett registers a paradigm shift in the understanding of subjectivity. Whereas Bergson aims, throughout his career, to contest the mechanical, habitual and automatic that threaten to encrust themselves upon the living, in Beckett’s often uncannily Johnsonian writing, the habitual and the automatic become progressively more central, until in the late works, habit and mechanical behaviour constitute a tenuous, fraught and primitive ontology, the residues of an agential self.

“One louse meets another louse,” Beckett jests in a letter to a friend (Letters 3 347). “The first says: ‘Anything wrong?’ The second: ‘I’m feeling man-y’.” Whether lepidopteran, chironomid, or oth...

Rabaté’s collection of essays examines the textual and digital revolutions that have expanded Samuel Beckett’s corpus over the last ten years and the critical approaches that have evolved to take account of this new material. Its chapters offer new ways of approaching and analysing Beckett’s fiction and drama.

The review examines the Russian translation of the third collection of critical essays by the Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee. The forming of Coetzee's literary-critical canon is suggested to have roots in his approach to world culture, free of the arrogance of an imperial view or the inferiority complex of a ‘cultural back¬water.' Common points between Coetzee's literary criticism and fiction include, firstly, attention to the core mechanisms of human psyche, which inevitably reveal a kind of transcendental dimension, and, secondly, the drive to revise the boundaries of the known literary universe. At the same time, the reviewed translation of Coetzee's essays is at times incoherent and shows an inexplicable disregard for an accurate use of relevant terminology. The translation suffers from stylistic flaws, terminology blunders and quasi-scholarly definitions, which devalue Coetzee's contribution to the Russian discourse of literary studies.

This is a comparative study of Samuel Beckett’s Textes pour rien (1950, published 1958) and John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing (1949, published 1961). These two projects, each of which emblematizes the...

Patrick Magee was Samuel Beckett’s close collaborator and friend who, through his monologues on BBC radio in the early 1960s, shaped the parameters of a generic Beckettian character, one that can still be detected in the production, reception and understanding of Beckett’s work today. Yet it has not been sufficiently understood that Magee’s performances emerge from a wide and shifting field of biographical, aesthetic, professional and economic forces, given his centrality not only to Beckett’s reception, but to many other areas of performance, from classic West End theatre to horror film, counter-cultural provocation to iconic Sixties television series. Magee’s distinctive realization of Beckett’s anonymous, isolated, seemingly ancient voices took place in the context of his sustained experiment with the nature and function of character across several media, and in this essay I think through the nature and consequences of this mobility. To do so I focus on his career from 1958 to 1964, that is to say, from the small part he played in the first airing of Beckett’s play All that Fall on the BBC Third Programme, to the Royal Shakespeare Company summer season at the Aldwych in London, which featured Magee as leading man in all four plays staged, including Beckett’s Endgame and Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade.

O artigo discute a questão da voz narrativa no romance O inominável de Samuel Beckett. Com base em estudos genéticos da composição do romance, discute-se a função literária de temas como a crítica à linguagem e à consciência, assim como suas consequências para se pensar o gênero do romance. O artigo retoma então uma discussão sobre realismo em textos de Adorno e Lukács com o intuito de debater a centralidade da fábula, sua estrutura temporal e a relação da forma com a experiência histórica. Por fim, tentaremos retomar essas questões a partir da análise de um momento específico do romance de Beckett. Com isso, as questões teóricas anteriormente expostas deverão ganhar concretude no esforço de elucidar problemas da composição do romance, como o feitio episódico do conjunto, a identidade da voz narrativa, a especificidade do monólogo interior e a confluência entre narrativa e reflexão.

Surrealism has long been a site of contestation in Beckett studies: while S.E. Gontarski, Chris Ackerley and Mark Nixon see in it at most a minor influence on the younger Beckett, Raymond Federman,...

Bodiness motif is one of the central ones in these novels and is shown in different ways, with S. Beckett and F. O`Brien borrowing the carnavalized corporeality of J. Joyce`s Ulysses . In Ulysses defined by its author as “the epic of the whole human body”, the bodiness motif creates the plot for the main characters` inner psychical life and is expressed through the body. In the novel Murphy thr corporeality is refracted through the world-view position of the main character, according to which the life of mind and spirit is burdened by the body. Finally, Murphy makes the life of body obedient to the mind, and dives into the space, where people are absorbed by their inner world and are unrelated to their body, — i.e., the mental hospital. In An Beal Bocht the bodiness motif is presented through the carnival categories of the lower and the higher, grotesque characters, reduction and parody that run through the entire novel. Conceptual ideas of metamorphosis and metempsychosis have different development and comprehension: in Ulysses it is embodied in the image of the city, where everything is connected to everything, Bloom`s character, Ahasuerus, in Stephen`s thoughts about god, who presents everything in everything in his own figure. In Murphy metamorphosis-metempsychosis is treated in a different way: the character aspires to come back to the beyond, and before that to go through the death as the reverse birth. An Beal Bocht stages a parodical inversion of the Ulysses ’ metempsychosis and the parody on the Irish folk tradition realized in the perennial living of the same life by the Irish, with the same name, James O`Donnell. The main characters of Ulysses , Murphy and An Beal Bocht aspire to escape or hide from the big world, to become isolated from it, to come back to their mothers’ wombs. F. O`Brien inherits the carnavalization of Ulysses `s episode «Circe» and in his An Beal Bocht the carnavalization is total, all-embracing, ramified and shapes not only the form and the contents of the novel, but also its ideological and world-view center.

In 1962, Beckett’s theatre debuted in Egypt and, ever since, it has inspired Egyptian playwrights. This paper examines how two Egyptian writers engaged with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, as an example of both Beckett’s work and so-named absurdist theater, revealing it to have more potential for political and social engagement than traditionally understood. Masir Sursar [Fate of a Cockroach] by Tawfiq Al-Hakim and Musafir Layl [Night Traveller] by Salah Abdul Saboor make a good case study of these effects.

This article explores the depiction of wounded soldiers in Samuel Beckett’s novel Mercier and Camier (written in French in 1946, published in 1970, and translated and published in English in 1974). This aspect of the novel is discussed from two perspectives: the Irish military history which Beckett repeatedly invokes in the novel, notably the Boer War and World War I; and the relation between the novel and the ‘war books’ which followed World War I, many of which express pacifist ideals by laying bare the suffering which combatant bodies experience. Drawing attention to the hitherto neglected context of war writing for the image of the wounded soldier in Beckett’s work, this article uses Mercier and Camier to consider the political implications of the author’s allusions to military history following World War II.

Translations into Dutch of Beckett’s works have been published from the early 1960s. Through his friendship with Geer and Bram van Velde, Beckett met their sister Jacoba shortly after the Second World War, and from the mid-1950s she became the most important translator of his works into Dutch. Jacoba sometimes collaborated with her life partner Frits Kuipers, who also single-handedly translated some of Beckett's major prose works. From the 1980s Martine Vosmaer and Karina van Santen took over from Van Velde and Kuipers as Beckett's main translators, but since the mid-1970s many of his works have also been translated by others. This chapter discusses the history of the translation of Beckett into the Dutch language, from its very beginnings to its latest title. In a brief aside, the author discusses his own translation into Dutch of Watt.

In the 1960s–70s mainland China, translation and reception of foreign literature were largely influenced by the national agenda of political struggles. Since early politically charged responses viewed Beckett as a French playwright representing Western decadent literature and art, translating Beckett was politically motivated. Aiying Liu embarks on a journey across Beckett’s translations in Chinese, from the first translation of Waiting for Godot to the 2016 collective debut of Beckett’s complete works. Aiying Liu argues that in the two decades after the end of the Great Cultural Revolution, Beckett attracted more and more critical attention. However, only very few of Beckett’s works were then translated into Chinese. With the Chinese intelligentsia’s active and continuous exploration of the Chinese way of modernity as well as with China’s deepening of its opening-up, Beckett’s work gradually interacted with Chinese culture from page to stage.

Scholars have often assumed that, since he knew the language, Beckett was personally involved in the Italian translations of his work. This was not the case. The editorial strategies of the Italian publishing industry did not invite this sort of commitment. The editing role Beckett embraced when Luigi Majno began to translate ‘Still’ for his M’Arte Edizioni is a rare exception. Gambacorta examines the impact Beckett’s ‘corrections and suggestions’ had on ‘Immobile’. The focus is on Beckett’s concern to maintain the structure of repetitions and the challenges posed by dealing with the lack of pronouns in a Romance language. Beckett’s notes to Majno also reveal a preoccupation for realistic settings and allow a rare look at his late Italian.

In this article Eysteinsson presents a portrait of Beckett and his work as reflected in the realm of Icelandic language and culture. Beckett’s dramatic work played an important part in the emergence of modernist drama in Iceland at the turn of the 1960s, as reflected in the staging of Waiting for Godot in Reykjavik in 1960. Ever since, Beckett has been a canonical presence in the Icelandic theatre, but one who has also been a source of important experimentation. The paper examines how Beckett was introduced into the Icelandic literary system, how he has been received, which texts have been translated and how meaningful connections have been sought between his ideas and writings and the local literary scene. This road runs mainly through the theatre, but the entry was also facilitated by a number of key individuals who avidly embraced his work.

In a letter to Israeli writer Matti Megged from 3.12.62 Beckett writes that there is little chance of him ‘ever going to Israel – or to any other distant place’. His work, however, travelled well, with Israeli writers and translators adapting it for a new audience from the 1950s onwards. This chapter studies the first translations into Hebrew of two Beckett plays – Waiting for Godot and Krapp’s Last Tape – tracing the circumstances and cultural debates in which these translations were created through archive materials and historical perspectives. Both translations were deeply involved with the national discussion of the desired proximity or distance between the literature of the new state and European culture, revolving especially around issues of avant-garde and experimental writing.

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot has spawned several unauthorized sequel plays, which see Godot arrive on stage in 1960s Yugoslavia, 1980s Ireland, 1990s North America, and early 2000s Japan. The sequel play is a largely ignored phenomenon in literary scholarship, with the sequel form itself routinely dismissed as a derivative and inevitably disappointing text. Yet the sequel also re-situates and re-evaluates the original text, and its reiterative nature aptly parallels the paradox of non-ending in Beckett’s original Waiting for Godot. Focusing on four unauthorized stage sequels to Beckett’s play – Miodrag Bulatović’s Godo je došao (Godot Has Arrived, 1966), Alan Titley’s Tagann Godot (Godot Arrives, 1987), Daniel Curzon’s Godot Arrives (1999), and Minoru Betsuyaku’s Yattekita Godot (Godot Has Come, 2007) – this article examines how these sequels rework the cultural logic of Godot’s arrival to their own critical and political ends. These playwrights draw on the very recursive, even frustrating, nature of the sequel form itself as an exegetic framework, reproducing the trope of non-ending that characterizes Beckett’s own work. Hannah Simpson is the Rosemary Pountney Junior Research Fellow in British and European Drama at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. She is currently working on two forthcoming Beckett-related monographs: Witnessing Pain: Samuel Beckett and Post-War Francophone Theatre and Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance.

International audience; The present article analyses the play Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) by Samuel Beckett. The study takes as its starting point the interpretation of its protagonist’s activity as an epistolary correspondence with himself through time, and by means of a new modality of it: the sound missive. In this way, the author stages both epistolary listening/reading and recording/writing between a present self and its past/future self, which acquire a spatial and temporal materiality in contrast to its literary realisation. Besides, this unique self-correspondence allows the expression of the character’s subjectivity and of his internal split, evidenced by the impossibility of the self-recogniton and the self-objectivation that define the epistolary activity. The letter thus becomes a new element of the independence of the theatrical from the literary postulated by the Theatre of the Absurd, of which Beckett is an epitome.; El presente artículo realiza un análisis de la obra teatral La Dernière Bande (1959) de Samuel Beckett a partir de la interpretación de la actividad de su protagonista como una correspondencia episto-lar consigo mismo a través del tiempo, y mediante una nueva modalidad de la misma: la misiva sonora. De este modo, el autor pone en escena una escucha/lectura y una grabación/escritura epistolar entre un yo presente y su yo pasado/futuro que adquieren materialidad espacial y temporal frente a su realización literaria. Además, esta singular auto-correspondencia permite la expresión de la subjetividad del perso-naje y de su escisión interior, que se evidencia mediante la imposibilidad del auto-reconocimiento y la auto-objetivación definitorias de la actividad epistolar. La misiva se convierte así en un nuevo elemento de la independencia de la expresión teatral frente a la literaria que defiende el Nouveau Theâtre, del que Beckett es uno de sus máximos representantes.; Le présent article réalise une analyse de la pièce La Dernière Bande (1959) de Samuel Beckett à partir de l’interprétation de l’activité de son protagoniste comme une correspondance épistolaire avec soi-même au fil du temps, et à travers une nouvelle modalité de celle-ci : la missive sonore. Ainsi, l’auteur met en scène une écoute/lecture et un enregistrement/écriture épistolaire entre un je présent et son je passé/futur qui acquièrent une matérialité spatiale et temporelle par rapport à leur accomplisse- ment littéraire. En outre, cette singulière auto-correspondance permet l’expression de la subjectivité du personnage y de sa scission intérieure, qui est mise en évidence par l’impossibilité de l’auto-reconnaissance et de l’auto-objetivation définitoires de l’activité épistolaire. La lettre devient donc un nouvel élément de l’indépendance de l’expression théâtrale face à l’expression littéraire que le Nouveau Théâtre défend et dont Beckett est l’un des plus hauts représentants.

Beckett’s work provides a visceral and clear-sighted critique of language as a territorialising force by which the self is irrevocably an object of nationalist pedagogy, that which “marks the emergence of the self and which the self does not control” (Bhabha). Exploring his fiction and drama in relation to the ethno-linguistic nationalism which emerged in Europe from the eighteenth century, a central focus of this chapter is the manner in which ‘the language crisis’ in Beckett is fraught with the language politics of his native country. It argues that Beckett’s fabled ‘abandoning’ of English recapitulates a history of cultural anxiety, especially acute among Protestant writers, concerning the viability of the English language as a vessel for an Irish national imaginary. The formulation of a “literature of the unword” in Beckett’s early career is similarly read in the shadow of the complex debate concerning ‘official’ language in the Irish Free State and a virulent nationalist language ideology which proselytised the ‘vulgarity’ of English. The chapter finally considers the disturbing ventriloquized speech suffered by Beckett’s characters, arguing that a key achievement of the Beckett canon is its exposure of language as the inscription on consciousness of political forms of community and continuity.

Synaesthesia, the cross-connection of the different senses like colour hearing, was an important element in Western art and literature around the beginning of the twentieth century. The delirium of the senses that Rimbaud's sonnet "Vowels" explored appealed to many innovative artists of the day. And it was inseparable from the tendency in symbolism and modernism to blur genre distinctions. Beckett was one of the many modernists in whose work synaesthetic sensibility is inscribed. This paper first outlines synaesthesia in symbolism and modernism, referring to new media and technology. It then considers how Beckett (especially in his early writings) can be situated in the trend.

This essay argues that Beckett's examination of media forms, rather than being eclipsed by, culminated in the return to prose around 1980, and that Beckett's long-term preoccupation with silence, incoherence and ‘the unword’ manifests in the relational nature of nostalgia in his later texts. Attending to a particular moment of Beckett's work on television and late prose – his directing the teleplay Geistertrio (Ghost Trio) at Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) and his simultaneous composition of the novella Company – compels examination of the reconfiguration of some of Beckett's earlier concerns with form and media in his late aesthetics. The use of separate recording processes for the audio track and visual footage in the production of Geistertrio is reflected in the disunity of visual and aural forms of expression in Company and later works. While Beckett still incorporates antagonistic relations figuratively in Company, the separate positioning of descriptions of sound and sight allows for a prominent tone of longing and affection, if also mixed with subtle irony. In this late phase of Beckett's work, the sense of disunity inherent to Beckett's conceptions of remembering and imagining operates through the combined separation of visual and aural expression. The haunting character of the affective and compositional structure of these late works connects to the function of Beethoven's piano trio ‘Geistertrio’ in Beckett's eponymous teleplay. At this point Beckett takes an interest in silence that occurs through the interplay of instrumental parts in Beethoven's music. Among Beckett's earlier formulations of the tension between form and incoherence, his juxtaposition of form with the chaos and distress of history anticipates the way in which Beckett uses formal disunity to let a path through the past be imagined in Company. The analysis which follows brings together Beckett's recently published letters, recollections from his colleagues of 1976 and 1977 and close textual study.