The Call for Papers has been announced for the Samuel Beckett Working Group at the International Federation for Theatre Research annual conference which will take place in Manila, The Philippines, 15th-19th July 2024.
Under the rubric Samuel Beckett, Tragedy and Catastrophe: From the Modern Stage to Contemporary Performance the full details of the call are as follows@
‘Beckett’s so-called “turn to the theatre” only took place in the late 1940s/early 1950s; yet, his thinking of the theatrical medium can be traced in his own writing as early as 1930, and tragedy takes centre stage in the theatre of his mind. In Proust, Beckett wrote:
Tragedy is not concerned with human justice. Tragedy is the statement of an expiation, but not the miserable expiation of a codified breach of a local arrangement, organised by the knaves for the fools. The tragic figure represents the expiation of the original sin, of the original and eternal sin, of him and all his ‘soci malorum,’ the sin of having been born (Beckett, 1957, 49).
This vision of tragedy – and tragic thinking in general – informed Beckett’s theatrical work throughout his life and manifests perhaps most prominently in the first line of A Piece of Monologue (1984): “Birth was the death of him” (Beckett, 2006, 425). In the history of modern theatre, Katharine Worth has convincingly singled out Beckett for his meaningful revival of the ancient Greek tragedy:
Beckett is the modern playwright above all others who has recreated (in his own terms) not only much of the theatrical stylization – scenic, musical, poetic – of the ancient Greek theatre, but also something of its spirit. He has restored to theatre a metaphysical dimension through situations that might seem to deny its existence. (Worth, 2004, 265–6).
And Burç İdem Dinçel explored thoroughly how Beckett became the “artist par excellence” in his reworking of mimesis from ancient Greek tragedies and philosophies, which “represents” (so to speak) a major contribution to both dramaturgy and Theatre Studies:
with the entrance of Beckett into the notional dynamics of the dramaturgy of mimesis, one comes full circle to the decisive paradox that emanates, first and foremost, from the “mimetic rejection of mimesis” and reaches an impasse with the futility of talking about non-mimetic works of art, insomuch as their (re)production hinges on a commitment to express (Dinçel, 2023, 91).
However, Beckett’s tragic poetics was put to the test of the Second World War. In “The Capital of the Ruins,” a text written for radio broadcast in 1946, he evokes in powerful terms the radical metaphysical shift that occurred: “‘Provisional’ is not the term it was, in this universe become provisional” (Beckett, 1995, 278). And he articulates the entailed ontological havoc that he perceived in Saint-Lô: “a vision and a sense of a time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again” (Beckett, 1995, 278). At stake are the tragic notions of hubris and fate.
In Endgame, Hamm is anxious to know “What’s happening, what’s happening?” and the answer he receives from his factotum is that “Something is taking its course” (Beckett, 2006, 98) in a world where “There’s no more nature,” at least “In the vicinity” (Beckett, 2006, 97). Human characters are thus condemned to live in a refuge, because “outside of [t]here it’s death” (Beckett, 2006, 96). Human beings cannot comprehend and attempt to triumph over nature anymore, because nature is dead, and their time and that of Earth appears as one and the same: the Anthropocene. Timothy Morton argues that “tragedy (from which the term hubris derives) is at least the initial mode of ecological awareness” (Morton, 2016, 21). And they specify that “the ecological emergency looks like tragedy. But, as the ancient Greeks knew, the tragic can be viewed another way to bring out its implicit comedy.” (Morton, 2016, 145). “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness” (Beckett, 2006, 101) may then be a form of “eco-humour,” whereby “We are beginning to trust the tactic of not waking ourselves up from the nightmare, but allowing ourselves to fall further into it, beyond horror.” (Morton, 2021, 29).
Dirk Van Hulle and Pim Verhulst have shown how Beckett distinctly reused the five-act tragic structure he sketched out in his “schoolboy copy” of Macbeth in his radio play All That Fall (1957) and in the playlet Catastrophe (1982), and they identified that it also influenced the structure of En attendant Godot; the English version of which is subtitled “A Tragicomedy in Two Acts” (Beckett, 2006, 7). After Saint-Lô, after Auschwitz, after Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Beckett does not discard the rubbles of tragedy in the theatre pit (as he did with bourgeois comedy in Eleutheria). But his “catastrophe[s] in which the swerve from survival has already taken place” (Salisbury, 2023, 156) use those eroded stones of tragedy as founding blocks of the new theatrical forms that “accommodate the mess” (Beckett, 1979, 219). As such, Beckett’s microcosms have become “extraordinarily redolent of our damaged planet given the rapidly increasing effects of human intervention upon the earth’s environment” (McMullan, 2021, 1). While considerable attention has been given in Beckett studies to tragedy, catastrophe and the environmental crisis, discourses that bring those elements in conversation only begin to emerge. We therefore seek to facilitate those conversations in the next meeting of the Samuel Beckett Working Group. All papers related to Beckett’s drama or Beckett in performance are welcome. We also encourage proposals in English and in French pertaining to (but not limited to) the following topics:
⁃ Emergency, crisis, catastrophe and disaster in Beckett’s drama
⁃ Beckett’s drama and ecologies of crisis
⁃ Beckett, mimesis and ecomimesis
⁃ Performing emergency in/with Beckett’s drama
⁃ Performing Beckett in spaces in crisis
⁃ Beckett and ancient, modern and contemporary tragedy
⁃ Beckett and the tragicomic form
⁃ Redefining the tragic in Beckett’s drama
⁃ Performing Beckett without tragedy
⁃ Tragic performances of Beckett’s oeuvre
⁃ Beckett and tragic art forms
The Samuel Beckett Working Group is an evolving international community of researchers, who seeks to support the development of excellent research on Beckett’s drama and Beckett in performance. We welcome postgraduate and early career researchers, as well as faculty and independent researchers. We value the participation of Beckett and non-Beckett experts alike, as both categories partake in the maintenance of a healthy interdisciplinary ecosystem. The submission of work at various levels of development is encouraged from early ideas on a project to work in progress to nearly finished papers. This community strives to offer rigorous and constructive feedback through respectful engagement with each other’s work. Our core values are inclusivity, diversity and care.
Abstracts can be submitted via the IFTR Cambridge Core portal. Please note that you must renew your membership or become a member in order to submit:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/membership/iftr.
The deadline for abstracts for working group papers is 2nd February 2024.
Papers of up to 3,000 words in length are to be distributed by 15th June 2024.
For information about the general conference, please check the IFTR website. Please also check for updates on the Samuel Beckett Working Group page at https://www.iftr.org/working-groups/samuel-beckett.
If you have questions about the group or about attending please contact the working group convenors, Céline Thobois, cthobois@tcd.ie, and Trish McTighe, t.mctighe@qub.ac.uk.
Please note that papers to be presented at the Working Group are distributed and read by all the participants ahead of the meeting. At the Working Group sessions presenters give short résumés of their work, followed by a lengthy discussion period (each presenter has 30 to 45 minutes in all, depending on the number of presenters). This is an extremely effective method, which allows ideas to be discussed, debated and evaluated, with participants suggesting directions for the presenters’ work-in-progress. There is limited space for presenters; there will also be a limited space for auditors, who may also be sent the papers to and be encouraged to engage in the discussions during the sessions.
Works Cited
Beckett, Samuel, Proust, New York: Grove Press, 1957.
–––. Interview by Tom Driver, Summer 1961, in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, edited by Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, 217–23. London: Routledge, Kegan Paul: Henley and Boston, 1979.
–––. The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, edited by S. E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press, 1995.
–––. The Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber and Faber, 2006.
Dinçel, Burç İdem, The Tragic Transformed: Attic Drama on the Contemporary Stage, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023.
McMullan, Anna, Beckett’s Intermedial Ecosystems, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Morton, Timothy, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
–––. All Art is Ecological, London: Penguin Books, 2021.
Salisbury, Laura, “Slow Violence and Slow Going: Encountering Beckett in the Time of Climate Catastrophe,” in Samuel Beckett and Catastrophe, edited by Michiko Tsushima, Yoshiki Tajiri and Mariko Tanaka, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
Van Hulle, Dirk, and Pim Verhulst, The Making of En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot, London: Bloomsbury; Antwerp: Antwerp University Press, 2017.
Worth, Katharine. “Greek Notes in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre Art.” In Dyonysus Since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millenium, edited by Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Amanda Wrigley, 265–83. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
The Samuel Beckett Society 