The call for papers has been announced for the latest in the online Beckett seminar series Grey Pluralities curated by Swati Joshi. This latest session, titled The Ultimate Cell in Samuel Beckett, ‘seeks to synthesise discourses within Beckett Studies, fostering an interdisciplinary dialogue that sits at the intersection of carceral scholarship, haptic phenomenology, affect of shame, and epithelial theory’ we are told. To this end, the seminar takes ‘the skin’ as a starting point to think about broader concerns within Beckett’s work, particularly modes of confinement, noting that ‘The skin of Beckettian characters is caressed, kissed, washed, bruised, bandaged, surgically operated, mired in mud, hurt by boots, etc., thereby manifesting it as a somatic palimpsest, an enveloping boundary where the inscriptions of trauma, traces of tenderness, and gestures of care converge in a layered narrative of survival.’.
The seminar will take place online 28 November 2026. 200 word abstracts are sought for inclusion to reach the organisers no later than 25 July 2026 at this address
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The Samuel Beckett Society 