Abstract This article argues that Waiting for Godot alludes to Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory . After showing that Beckett’s knowledge of Dalí and of Surrealist contexts makes the connection historically plausible, it traces a series of visual and thematic correspondences between the play and the painting. The final section suggests that the allusion opens a paranoiac-critical reading of the play as a dreamscape shaped by memory, impotence, and the afterlife of the Occupation.
This paper explores Beckett's depiction of relationships between human and more-than-human others by examining uncanny images of eating. Fasting and earth-eating are presented as attempts to escape violent networks of feeding, but this fantasy of autonomy is impossible, and Beckett's hungry characters repeatedly find themselves predated, in imagery which reimagines the human ecologically, refusing the human exceptionalist position that does not admit that humans are edible. Beckett's images of parasitism in particular destabilise the concept of the human subject as separate and singular, instead understanding individuals within an ecosystem, intimately connected to and dependent upon human and non-human others.
This article examines the world of mud in Beckett's How It Is as a psychic milieu indispensable to his aesthetic practice. Through comparative analysis with Suzuki's concepts of 'earth' and 'material-spiritual,' and Bion's analytical space informed by Keats's 'negative capability,' it argues that these three milieus reflect fundamental conditions underlying artistic creation, religious experience, and psychoanalytic practice. All operate through suspending ordinary sensory perception and intellect. This suspension unfolds within temporal duration, enabling another form of perception and thinking to emerge.
Samuel Beckett's death occurred at the inauguration of the digital age in 1989. This new age activated certain latent tendencies in Beckett's work and de-activated others, but there are ways that Beckett prefigures our experience in the digital world. Drawing on the Beckett archives and recent considerations of the Anthropocene and cybernetics, I consider this post-digital moment, which is witnessing the blurring of distinctions between the organic and technological, engendering a posthuman with a multiplicity of ontologies and agency distributed across a plurality of worlds. In a postAnthropocene age, Beckett's work may offer a new locus for being human.
The Indigenous rock art discussed in this essay is located on the lands and waterways of the Wandjina Wunggur: the `water people' of the Ngarinyin, Wila Wila, Wororra and Wunambal language groups in the Kimberley region in the northern region of Western Australia. The deep antiquity of these cultural traditions surpasses any other rock art tradition globally. These artifacts are located in the region of the Australian continent with the longest record of human habitation, resting on some of the oldest extant rock formations on the planet. I acknowledge the custodians of this land, their cultural knowledge and custom, and their elders past and present. This material is considered in this essay as an embodiment of enduring cultural production and what its recognition might illuminate when brought into conversation with the work of Samuel Beckett. I draw on expert scholarly work in discussing Gwion Gwion and Wanjina rock art and refer readers to scholarly discussions of Indigenous Knowledge Systems and community-led Indigenous scholarship (see Jones 2021; Rawlings et al. 2021).
When the male protagonist summons the muse-like presence of the woman in ... but the clouds ..., her face appears only to refuse both his and the viewer's gaze. Reading the play alongside Bracha Ettinger's series of paintings, Eurydice, a feminist aesthetic re-engagement with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, this article argues that both create aesthetic and affective environments of resistance and refusal that destabilise the figure of the muse and question the Orphic gaze. Working with a YouTube, DVD and VHS recording of the play, this article shows how each generation of recording and digitisation makes this even more apparent.
This article examines the creative fixation on insects, plants, and mud in a range of texts by Beckett and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, particularly her 1964 novel The Passion According to G.H. In addition to Beckett scholarship, the article draws on concepts from Environmental Humanities, including `becoming-with' and `passionate immersion:These ideas bring into focus the effects of Beckett and Lispector's provocative insistence on the dispersal of their characters and narrators beyond the human into a radical intimacy with insects, plants, and mud.
Taking a comparative approach, this article provides a legal commentary on the copyright disputes over the work of Samuel Beckett. This work highlights conflicts in respect of copyright law and dramatic works within the performing arts community. It provides a comparative analysis of copyright disputes in civil law countries in the European Union, particularly looking at the Netherlands, France, Italy, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. This article looks at the respective interests of playwrights, dramaturges, directors, producers, performers, theatre companies, and the viewing public. In particular, it focuses upon legal and policy debates over the copyright term and the public domain; the operation of economic rights and defences such as fair dealing; and the comparative application of moral rights. This article considers the larger questions raised by the copyright litigation over the work of Samuel Beckett in respect of the intersection of intellectual property and human rights—looking at the impact of copyright law upon freedom of speech, artistic expression, and censorship. In particular, the conflicts over the performance of the work of Samuel Beckett raise questions about intellectual property, sexual discrimination, and gender equality.
Scholars, theatre-makers and publics continue to associate Samuel Beckett with zealous control over drama exercised via copyright. Beckett’s theatre is often described as ‘frozen’ or ‘preserved in aspic’, but such images make certain assumptions—univocal playtexts, consistent protection—that do not hold up to further scrutiny. Rather than the rigid protection of a ‘frozen’ work, the estate’s legal activities are better thought of as a series of gestures carried out against variable and shifting conditions in different times and geographies. Not only legalistic and political, these gestures have an important aesthetic content. Gestures of copyright control have made, and continue to make, a profound contribution to the aesthetics of Beckett performance.
By closely examining a series of productions of Beckett’s theatre, through the critical lens of literary and theatre studies, supplemented with a legal perspective, this introduction highlights the central concerns of this issue of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui . It aims to understand how the reception of Beckett’s theatre in Central Europe sheds light both on the singular trajectories within individual countries and on the shared characteristics specific to this geographical and cultural area.
Born in 1983, Olena Zavhorodnya is a Ukrainian professional actress, dramaturge, and director with experience in theatre, movies, and television. In 2022, following the Russian attacks on Ukraine she fled to the West. She currently lives in Prague, where she collaborates with the Ukrainian Yellow & Blue Theatre and the Prague Shakespeare Company, an English-speaking theatre company in Prague. In 2022, she staged Waiting for the H , a contemporary and political reinterpretation of Waiting for Godot , directly reflecting the Ukrainian context, at the Divadlo na Pradle. In this April 2023 interview, she discusses the production.
Marek Kędzierski, a writer and theatre practitioner of Polish origin, had the privilege of being both a translator and director of Beckett’s work. In this testimony, he recounts how his personal journey became intertwined with European history while crossing paths with the Irish playwright. Through this singular perspective, the article aims to contextualize Beckett’s work in Central Europe, weaving together both personal and professional insights.
The works of Samuel Beckett and William Burroughs have rarely been compared. When the two have been compared, it has been mainly in biographical studies or more generally in works on experimental literature. The two authors shared the same publisher in the 1950s, and Burroughs, who in those years was using the cut-up technique, declared that he had used Beckett’s texts in his work, without specifying which texts or scenes he had used. Common themes between Beckett and Burroughs which have not yet been explored, such as the theme of the agent-writer, as well as images that recur in their work, could lead to the hypothesis that the work of the Irish author may have inspired the guru of the Beat Generation. The aim of this paper is to propose an initial investigation into the hypothesis that some of the central themes in Naked Lunch , and especially in Burroughs’ Nova trilogy , were already present in Beckett’s Trilogy and, as such, provided inspiration.
This article examines an operatic adaptation of Film (Beckett 1967) titled Film Performance (Perc 2021) premiered in 2022 at Tête-à-Tête, London’s fringe opera festival. The modifications introduced in this adaptation are compared with how Beckett’s plays have been modified in twenty-first century Poland (Brzeska 2017) in terms of current political and social reflections, female-substituted casting, and musical expansions. Beckett’s critical approach to technologies analysed by Bignell (2022) regarding the 2013 German television version of What Where (Beckett 1984) was revisited in this operatic adaptation within a post-pandemic context and is understood through the conceptual framework of opera as hypermedium (Havelková 2021).
Scholars, theatre-makers and publics continue to associate Samuel Beckett with zealous control over drama exercised via copyright. Beckett's theatre is often described as 'frozen' or 'preserved in aspic', but such images make certain assumptions-univocal playtexts, consistent protection-that do not hold up to further scrutiny. Rather than the rigid protection of a 'frozen' work, the estate's legal activities are better thought of as a series of gestures carried out against variable and shifting conditions in different times and geographies. Not only legalistic and political, these gestures have an important aesthetic content. Gestures of copyright control have made, and continue to make, a profound contribution to the aesthetics of Beckett performance.
Specific features of the Polish reception of the work of Samuel Beckett prompt a discussion of present tensions between conservative and experimental approaches to Beckett's work. The article discusses experiments inspired by Beckett's work, conducted yearly by a group of researchers around Gdansk since 2010. In some cases, these activities approach Beckett's work in ways that connect an academic perspective with artistic interpretations. After discussing the post-1950s evolution of Beckett studies in Poland, I concentrate on current academic discourses that surround Beckett's work in a Polish context.
This article focuses on Angela Moorjani's book Beckett and Buddhism (2021) to advance a transtextual framework for understanding Beckett's Buddhist and non-European influences. Though 'transtext' is mentioned by Moorjani, it is not elaborately theorized by her. I theorize this idea from Gerard Genette's narratology to account for the mediated, multi-layered influences Moorjani reads in her book. I posit the transtextual operation as an outside-in movement where the context pushes the text from its surroundings and build on the political aspect of this transtextual influence by importing Edward Said's orientalism into the discussion. In the process, I offer micro-readings from Beckett's Murphy and How It Is that respond to Moorjani's readings to highlight Beckett's oblique critique of the orientalist discourse. The objective is to address the neglected political regime of representation in Beckett's unconscious borrowings and disavowals around Buddhism and Indian thought. I further the political inquiry by invoking Ambedkarite Buddhism in India and its mobilization of the Buddhist nonself as a tool for emancipation from the oppressive identitarian discourse of 'caste.' This invocation along with the third and final micro-reading from the novella 'The End' shows how Beckett's appeal to the Buddhist non-self has a political undercurrent with a critique of identitarian discourses.
Taking a comparative approach, this article provides a legal commentary on the copyright disputes over the work of Samuel Beckett. This work highlights conflicts in respect of copyright law and dramatic works within the performing arts community. It provides a comparative analysis of copyright disputes in civil law countries in the European Union, particularly looking at the Netherlands, France, Italy, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. This article looks at the respective interests of playwrights, dramaturges, directors, producers, performers, theatre companies, and the viewing public. In particular, it focuses upon legal and policy debates over the copyright term and the public domain; the operation of economic rights and defences such as fair dealing; and the comparative application of moral rights. This article considers the larger questions raised by the copyright litigation over the work of Samuel Beckett in respect of the intersection of intellectual property and human rights looking at the impact of copyright law upon freedom of speech, artistic expression, and censorship. In particular, the conflicts over the performance of the work of Samuel Beckett raise questions about intellectual property, sexual discrimination, and gender equality.
The essay focuses on the performance of Samuel Beckett's plays in Slovakia and aims to explore their various interpretations on Slovak stages. Beckett's work was initially promoted in Slovakia by intellectuals. Julius Pasteka began systematically writing about Beckett in 1964, while a team of authors from the journal Slovenske divadlo published studies on the theatre of the absurd and several translations. The first play by Beckett to be staged in Slovakia was Happy Days in 1965, followed by Waiting for Godot, which premiered in 1968 and later became Beckett's most frequently staged work. Four key productions of Waiting for Godot (1968, 1990, 1992 and 1997) reflected the social and political context of their times, shifting away from the original philosophical perspective. These productions predominantly employed satirical and comedic elements. Although other plays by Beckett were also staged, interest among Slovak audiences gradually waned.
The works of Samuel Beckett and William Burroughs have rarely been compared. When the two have been compared, it has been mainly in biographical studies or more generally in works on experimental literature. The two authors shared the same publisher in the 1950s, and Burroughs, who in those years was using the cut-up technique, declared that he had used Beckett's texts in his work, without specifying which texts or scenes he had used. Common themes between Beckett and Burroughs which have not yet been explored, such as the theme of the agent-writer, as well as images that recur in their work, could lead to the hypothesis that the work of the Irish author may have inspired the guru of the Beat Generation. The aim of this paper is to propose an initial investigation into the hypothesis that some of the central themes in Naked Lunch, and especially in Burroughs' Nova trilogy, were already present in Beckett's Trilogy and, as such, provided inspiration.
