The provisional programme for the 8th Annual Samuel Beckett Society Conference has just been announced by the organisers. The event will take place completely on-line and shows a widely diverse international list of presenters. Participation and attendance is free of charge to all members of the society. Links will be provided closer to the event.
Friday December 1st 2023
8.30-9.00 am – Welcome and orientation
9.00-10.30 am – Panel 1a: ‘Environments and Agencies’
Rina Kim: ‘“There is of course the bag”: Evocative Objects and the Question of Agency in Beckett’s Plays’
Cecily Niumeitolu: ‘“Without Recoil”: Murphy and ‘Energy’
Yann Mevel, ‘Résonances beckettiennes’
Panel 1b: ‘Affective Intertextualities’
Daniela Caselli, Title to be confirmed
Vanesa Cotroneo, ‘“Dramaturgie des Laufens”: Beckett’s Writings Haunting German Gothic Sculpture’
Celia Graham-Dixon, ‘“Look at me! […] Speak to me!”: …but the clouds… and Beckett’s aesthetic and affective environments of resistance and refusal’
10.30-11 am – Break
11.00-12.30 pm – Keynote 1: Julie Bates (Trinity College Dublin)
‘“Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift”: radical intimacy with environments in Beckett’s writing’
12.30-1.30 pm – Break
1.30-3.00 pm – Keynote 2: Arka Chattopadhyay (IIT Gandhinagar)
‘Beckett in the Anthropocene: What is your ecology?’
3.00-3.15 pm – Break
3.15-4.45 pm – Panel 2a: ‘Systems and Environments’
Derval Tubridy, ‘Beckett and Machine Learning in the Novacene’
Matthew Reeder, ‘Echoes, Ecosystems, Resonance, and Reception Between Beckett
and Rebecca Saunders’
Benjamin Wilson, ‘The Environmental Systematic’
Panel 2b: ‘Worlding/Unworlding’
Annette Balaam, ‘Beckett in a Post-Anthropocene Age: A Work in Progress’
Thomas Symeonidis, ‘Aesthetics of world-making in Samuel Beckett’s early novels’
Darren Gribben, ‘“I can’t write… I can only walk the fields and climb the ditches”; “Back from a spell at Ussy with the dead leaves, dead voices”: Environmental Loss in an Environment of Loss’
4.45-5.00 pm – Break
5.00-6.30 pm – Early Career Research Forum: Led by Julie Bates and Katherine Weiss
6.30-6.45 – Break
6.45-8.25 pm – Panel 3a: ‘Representing the Apocalyptic’
Luciano Gatti, ‘Beckett and Adorno: nature domination and aesthetic realism’
Katherine Weiss, ‘Happy Days, the Environment and Humanity in Crisis’
Márcia Lemos, ‘“Steps into the nothingness”: Beckettian Echoes in Cormac McCarthy’s Post-apocalyptic Novel The Road’
Panel 3b: ‘More than/Less than Human Worlds I’
Robert Baker-White, ‘The Impotent Natural in Krapp’s Last Tape’
Kaitlin Thurlow, ‘“End of Descriptive Passage”: Sublime Encounters in Mercier and Camier’
Umar Shehzad, ‘“[T]his clonic earth”: Spasmodic Environment of Beckett’s Poetry’
Jonathan Basile, ‘Mother, Nature, Remains: Beckett’s autour Function and the Ecological’
8.45-10.00 pm – Beckett Pub Quiz
Saturday 2nd December, 2023
9.00-10.30 am – Keynote 3: Mark Byron (University of Sydney)
‘Beckett’s Durable Environments’
10.30-11.00 am – Break
11.00-12.30 am – Panel 4a: ‘More than/Less than Human Worlds II’
Michiko Tsushima, ‘The “Soul Landscape” of Mud in How It Is and the Spirituality of “the Earth” in Buddhist Thought’
Asijit Datta, ‘Extinction and Beckett’s Inexhaustibles’
Nilanjana Bhattacharya, ‘Less than Human: The Suffering Body Under Confinement Architecture in Beckett’s The Lost Ones’
Panel 4b: ‘Beyond Human Skin’
Ki Kwok, ‘Tracing the footsteps of “No more nature” in Endgame’
Sabrina Fernandez, ‘Ending Bodies in Ended Environments: An Ecosomatic Approach to Embodiment and Emplacement in Samuel Beckett’s Drama’
Yannis Athanassiou, ‘Unknowable Beings’
Annie Bowes, ‘The Diet of Worms’
12.30-1.00 pm – Break
1.00-2.30 pm – Panel 5a: ‘Landscape/Seascape’
Shahriyar Mansouri, ‘Less than Environment: The Spectral Sea in Embers’
Feargal Whelan, ‘Verisimilitude: Re-imagining a Beckett Country’
Bernadette Fox, Title to be confirmed
Panel 5b: ‘Nothing to be Done?’
Aysha and Muhammad Saeed Nasir, ‘Isolation and Despair in a Dying World: An Ecocritical Analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and Endgame in the Context of Pakistan’s Ecological Crisis’
Abhinaba Chatterjee, ‘The Aesthetic Environment of “Absurdity” in Beckett’s Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape: A Nietzschean Perspective’
Niloofar Rezaee, ‘“Then All Go Dead”: Hyperobjects and the Collapse of Anthropocentrism in Samuel Beckett’s The Lost Ones’
2.40-3.00 pm – Break
3.00-4.30 pm — Judy Hegarty Lovett of Gare St Lazare in conversation with Lois Oppenheim
4.30-5.00 pm – Break
5.00-6.30 pm – Panel 6a: ‘Making Time’
Felipe de Souza Santos, ‘Space, time and rhythm as defining elements of Rockaby’s atmosphere: a reflection based on the concepts of tempo-rhythm and chronotope’
Joshua Gottlieb, ‘Worstward Ho and Fighting the Climate Emergency’
Ivan Nyusztay, ‘Post-traumatic Cynicism, Regress and Lessness in Beckett’s Watt’
Panel 6b: ‘Making Space’
Patrick Bixby, ‘Happy Days, Heterotopias, and the Everyday’
Chloe Duane, ‘Surveilling the user-audience: Surveillance technologies, discipline and power in Unmakeablelove and Virtual Play’
Douglas Atkinson, ‘“So That the Void May Protrude”: Autographic Spatiality in Malone Dies’
6.30-7.00 pm – Break
7.00-8.00 pm – General Meeting of the Samuel Beckett Society
8.00-8.30 pm – Closing remarks
8.30 onwards – Social
The Samuel Beckett Society 