The Samuel Beckett Working Group will be meeting at the IFTR International Federation for Theatre Research Annual Conference 2022. IFTR 2022’s conference theme, Shifting Centres (In the Middle of Nowhere), is apposite for the Samuel Beckett Working Group, as well as for our times (https://iftr.org/conference/call-for-papers). Beckett’s work has spoken readily to many over the last two…
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A colloquium in honour of the Beckett pioneer Rosemary Pountney is to be held at Jesus College, Oxford on 28 January 2022. Launching the Cambridge University Press series ‘Elements in Beckett Studies’, the event will include contributions from authors whose work has already been published in the series over the past year. The series is…
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Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon have been awarded funding from the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council for a 3-year project: ‘Editing Beckett: Towards a Bilingual Digital Genetic Edition of Samuel Beckett’s Works’ which forms part of the ongoing Beckett Digital Manuscript Project [BDMP]. The purpose of the BDMP, as stated by its…
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While we struggle with the seemingly-unending pandemic, the Beckett community has been continuing to perform, come together (occasionally) and write as best it can. In this issue, we review productions of Waiting for Godot in the claustrophobic confines of Zoom, to Happy Days in a limestone field on a remote island. Lisa Dwan talks about…
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Beckett in Foxrock has been running annually since 2016 from the writer’s home parish church of Tullow on the southside of Dublin. The highlight of each year’s celebrations is a performance by Mouth on Fire theatre company in the unique atmosphere of the church itself. In 2019, an unforgettable presentation of All That Fall led…
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Spectral Landscapes: Absence, Trauma & Nationhood is a two-day inter-disciplinary conference hosted by the University of Reading which aims to explore questions of spectrality, trauma, hauntings and landscape in connection to national and social identity in Beckett’s works. The two-day event, which forms part of Reading’s annual Beckett Week and runs on 4-5 November, 2021,…
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This autumn sees the publication of two books which address the issue of translation in Beckett’s oeuvre. Samuel Beckett and Translation (Palgrave), edited by José Francisco Fernández and Mar Garre García adresses a number of themes including Beckett’s self-translations, translations of other authors and the poetics of translation, in a collection comprising thirteen chapters followed…
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Beckett and Buddhism is a new work from Cambridge University Press by long-time Beckett scholar and Society member Angela Moorjani . Drawing on letters and archives along with recent studies of Buddhist thought and Schopenhauer’s knowledge of it, the book charts the Buddhist concepts circling through Beckett’s visions of the ‘human predicament’. Moorjani offers an…
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Call for Papers – Deadline 31st July 2021 Spectral Landscapes: Absence, Trauma and Nationhood 4th-5th November 2021, University of Reading “places belong to our bodies and our bodies belong to these places. We learn how to orientate and re-orientate ourselves in relation to them and form internalized representations of them (cognitive maps) which play a…
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The latest on-line version of Waiting for Godot is the first project of American company The New Group Off Stage, and is described as ‘an experimental exploration of a storied play, bringing together a roster of lauded artists from across the cultural spectrum. A combination of theatrical invention and innovative filmmaking. At once both a…
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The Samuel Beckett Society 