Beckett and Animals

A new collection of essays edited by Mary Bryden

Beckett and Animals, ed. Mary Bryden

Beckett and Animals
Edited by Mary Bryden
University of Reading

20% discount if ordered before 28 February 2014
Order online at www.cambridge.org/beckett14
or enter the discount code beckett14 at the checkout

The animals that appear in Samuel Beckett's work are diverse and unpredictable. They serve as victim and persecutor, companion and adversary, disconcerting observers and objects oblivious to the human gaze. Bringing together an international array of Beckett specialists, this is the first full-length study to explore the significance of the animals that populate Beckett's prose, drama and poetry. Essays theorise a broad spectrum of animal manifestations while focusing on the roles that distinct animal forms play within Beckett's work, including horses, sheep, cats, dogs, bees, insects and others. Contributors situate close readings within a larger literary and cultural context, drawing on thinkers ranging from Aristotle to Deleuze, Foucault and Agamben, and on authors such as Flaubert, Kafka and Coetzee. The result is an incisive and provocative collection that traverses disciplinary boundaries, revealing how Beckett's creatures challenge conventional notions of species identity and, ultimately, what it means to be human.

Hardback £55.00 Discount price £44.00

Contents

List of Contributors; Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations
Introduction, by Mary Bryden

Part I: Animality

1. Shane Weller, ‘Forms of Weakness: Animalisation in Kafka and Beckett’;
2. Yoshiki Tajiri, ‘Beckett, Coetzee, and Animals’;
3. Mary Bryden, ‘The Beckettian Bestiary’;
4. David Wheatley, ‘”Quite Exceptionally Anthropoid”: Species Anxiety and Metamorphosis in Beckett's Humans and Other Animals’;
5. Naoya Mori, ‘”An Animal Inside”: Beckett/Leibniz’s Stone, Animal, Human and the Unborn’;
6. Ulrika Maude, ‘Pavlov's Dogs and Other Animals in Samuel Beckett’;
7. Yoshiyuki Inoue, ‘Little Animals in the Brain: Beckett's “porteurs de la mémoire”’.

Part II: The Specificity of Animals

8. Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘”Think, Pig!”: Beckett's Animal Philosophies’;
9. Linda Ben-Zvi, ‘Beckett's “Necessary” Cat(s)’;
10. Steven Connor, ‘Making Flies Mean Something’;
11. Joseph Anderton, ‘”Hooves!”: The Equine Presence in Beckett’;
12. Angela Moorjani, ‘The Dancing Bees in Samuel Beckett's Molloy: The Rapture of Unknowing’;
13. Chris Ackerley, ‘”Despised for Their Obviousness”: Samuel Beckett's Dogs’;
14. Julie Campbell, ‘Beckett and Sheep’;
15. Maximilian de Gaynesford, ‘”Eyes in Each Other's Eyes”: Beckett, Kleist, and the Fencing Bear’;
16. Brigitte Le Juez, ‘Words Without Acts: Beckett's Parrots’.

Index

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Who is Beckett's Godot?
• A Companion to Samuel Beckett
• University of Reading: Beckett Conference 2009

Bloomsbury Revelations: Reissue Series

A series of major works from the fields of philosophy, politics, religion and critical theory

Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

Karl Barth, On Religion

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Martin Buber, I and Thou

Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be?

Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image

Jacques Ranciére, The Politics of Aesthetics

Mohandas K. Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers

Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther, Discourse on Free Will

Roland Barthes, Language of Fashion

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Movement-Image

Alain Badiou, Being and Event

Erich Fromm & Karl Marx, Marx's Concept of Man
including 'Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts'

Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real

Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred

Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth

Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil
Or The Lucidity Pact

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution

Bernhard Crick, In Defence of Politics

Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness

For more information on the Bloomsbury Revelations series, visit their official website. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Christopher King on Book Cover Design
• Philosophers: Jacques Derrida
• The Book Cover Club
• 20 Most Iconic Book Cover Designs?
• Book Cover Archive
• Judging a book...
• The Great Gatsby: Re-Covered
• Peter Mendelsund in Design Bureau

Style in Theory: Between Literature and Philosophy

A new title from Bloomsbury

Style in Theory: Between Literature and Philosophy, ed. Ivan Callus, James Corby, Gloria Lauri-Lucente

From Bloomsbury Publishing:

'What, in theory, is style? How has style been rethought in literary theory?'

Drawing together leading academics working within and across the disciplines of English, philosophy, literary theory, and comparative literature, Style in Theory: Between Philosophy and Literature sets out to rethink the important but all-too-often-overlooked issue of style, exploring in particular how the theoretical humanities open conceptual spaces that afford and encourage reflection on the nature of style, the ways in which style is experienced and how style allows disciplinary boundaries to be both drawn and transgressed.

Offering incisive reflections on style from a diverse and contemporary range of theoretical and methodological perspectives, the essays contained in this volume critically revisit and challenge accepted accounts of style, and provide fresh and compelling readings of the relevance in any rethinking of style of specific works by the likes of Shakespeare, Petrarch, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze, Blanchot, Derrida, Nancy, Cixous and Meillassoux. [Read More]

Contributors: Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania), Laurent Milesi (Cardiff University), Saul Anton (The New School & Pratt), Gloria Lauri-Lucente (University of Malta), Stuart Sillars (University of Bergen), Stefan Herbrechter (Coventry University), James Corby (University of Malta), Chris Muller (Cardiff University), Douglas Burnham (Staffordshire University), Fiona Hughes (University of Essex), Janice Sant (Cardiff University), Marie-Dominique Garnier (Université de Paris-8 Vincennes-à-St-Denis), Mario Aquilina (Durham University), Ivan Callus (University of Malta), Giuseppe Mazzotta (Yale).

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Why read Derrida?
• A Tour of Slavoj Žižek's Apartment
• Documentary: Examined Life (2008)
• Theodor W. Adorno, Dream Notes

Thomas Pynchon, Philosophy, Ethics

3:AM Magazine publishes an essay by Martin Paul Eve

From Martin Paul Eve (3:AM Magazine):

Thomas Pynchon ranks among the most critically acclaimed American authors of the past fifty years; certainly so when viewed in terms of academic scholarship. He has two academic journals devoted solely to his work and influence (Pynchon Notes and Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon), over twenty monographs exploring his writing and, since 1978, there have been 23 doctorates awarded in the United Kingdom alone on, or in major part concerning, his fiction. This trend shows no sign of stopping; with apologies to the well-known formulation of James Joyce, almost a century ago, it seems as though Thomas Pynchon will continue to keep the professors busy.

The reasons for this critical proliferation are not hard to fathom. Pynchon is a man of mystery, refusing to be photographed or interviewed, who has published some of the finest works of post-war literature, particularly V., Gravity’s Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon. His novels have most frequently been type-cast as exemplary of the postmodern – saturated as they are with paranoia, indeterminacy and failed quest-narratives – but this seriously underplays the scale of Pynchon’s writing. Consider that Pynchon is also a writer of enormous historical scope. V. spans the defining moments of crisis in the twentieth century, Gravity’s Rainbow re-casts the sixties in terms of World War II and the history of Calvinism (including a flashback to a Mauritian Dodo hunt) while Mason & Dixon explores the interrelation of its eponymous protagonists with the Age of Reason and slavery in America. If this weren’t enough, his novels are interdisciplinary, incorporating metaphors from science and technology, cartography, popular culture, cartoons, aural puns, mathematical in-jokes, outrageous character names (and sexual practices) and sublime prose poetry.

More important than any of these preceding aspects, though, is the fact that Pynchon is a politically engaged, ethical writer. Gravity’s Rainbow is not just a dense, postmodern sprawl, but instead makes one of its central observations on the fact that the evil of mankind, parallel to nature, “does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation”, a spatio-temporal transposition to a new setting, persisting Beyond the Zero of any Pavlovian deconditioning, and always collecting around centres of power, embodied by the novel’s final, America-bound, transatlantic V-2/ICBM. Through this impossible moment, Pynchon highlights that behind twentieth-century America’s technological and economic supremacy lies the dark negotiations of Operation Paperclip and a re-embodiment of the right-wing politics supposedly vanquished in the Second World War. How many of us notice, inscribed upon our antibiotics, the second label, permanently hidden beneath the surface-level, reading “sulfonamide” and “I.G. Farben”? How many of us see, when we watch satellite television, the German technician crying: “Vergeltungswaffe”? [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Thomas Pynchon: Signed Books
• A new Thomas Pynchon novel?
• International Pynchon Week 2013
• Paul Thomas Anderson on Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Trailer for Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Thomas Pynchon: Man of Mystery
• Thomas Pynchon on Objective Reality

Contra Mundum Press talks to The Brooklyn Rail

An interview with Rainer J. Hanshe, founder of the independent publishing house

From The Brooklyn Rail:

Contra Mundum Press, founded in New York in late 2011, is an unusual new press with a distinctive list of publications to date. It debuted with a new translation by Stuart Kendall of the ancient epic Gilgamesh, which unites recent scholarship and a spare poetic sensibility to capture the consciousness of the archaic mind in the early days of our civilization. Thereafter, in rapid succession, CMP went on to publish six more books, including Self-Shadowing Prey, one of the last works written by Romanian Surrealist poet Ghérasim Luca, a stunning linguistic achievement that, as Gilles Deleuze wrote, “makes stuttering an affect of language and not an affectation of speech.” Committed to publishing challenging and innovative writing, including texts that have either never been translated into English or have long since gone out of print, CMP defines itself as “dedicated to the value and the indispensable importance of the individual voice.” CMP champions innovative fiction, drama, poetry, philosophy, essays, and writings on the visual arts and cinema. Forthcoming this fall is the world premiere of Pessoa’s Philosophical Essays and the first English publication of director Elio Petri’s Writings on Cinema. In keeping with its international perspective on exceptional literature, CMP’s aspiration is to eventually publish books in languages other than English, and its founder, novelist Rainer J. Hanshe, has relocated to Berlin to facilitate this aim. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Contra Mundum Press awarded grant
• Contra Mundum Press
• Stuart Kendall translates Gilgamesh
• Rainer J. Hanshe, The Acolytes
• Rainer J. Hanshe on The Acolytes
• Ghérasim Luca, Self-Shadowing Prey

Lars Iyer on Max Brod and Franz Kafka

Alex Shepard interviews the author of Spurious and Dogma

Lars Iyer

From a 2011 interview by Full Stop:

[In Spurious,] Lars and W. worship Kafka and wonder if they more resemble Kafka or Max Brod, his executor. Is Kafka one of your heroes? Do you, like Lars and W., think of yourself as more of a Max Brod than a Kafka?

I do not even see myself as a Brod! Max Brod was the most energetic of men – he wrote a great deal, he was active in various intellectual circles – and he placed himself most genuinely in the service of others. A remarkable combination. W. and Lars seem to form the entirety of each other’s intellectual circle, and the question whether they actually help anybody is an open one.

Am I a Brod? But I wrote a novel. And one writes novels, I think, in the hope that one might be more than a Brod. Brod, no doubt, wanted to be more than a Brod. At what stage did he realise that he was no Kafka? My argument: he never realised it. Perhaps to write a novel is to be a Brod who wants to be Kafka. And perhaps that’s why Kafka couldn’t finish his own novels. He, too, in his own way, was a Brod.

But we live in a different time from Kafka’s, when the hope of being a Kafka will result in something altogether different than becoming Kafka. Kafka’s displaced relations to Jewish traditions have their counterparts today, perhaps, in our displaced relations with the novel, and with figures like Kafka. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Lars Iyer on Blanchot's Vigilance
• Lars Iyer on Literature's Antagonistic Couples
• Extracts from Lars Iyer's Dogma available online
• Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept
• Lars Iyer on Writing, Reading and Thinking
• Literary Influences on Lars Iyer's Spurious
• Lars Iyer, Spurious

Beckett and Brain Science: Free Warwick Symposium

Milburn House, University of Warwick · 18 September 2012

Design: Rhys Tranter

Beckett and Brain Science Project

A one-day symposium at Milburn House, University of Warwick
18 September 2012

The symposium will hear from psychiatrists and doctors who use Beckett’s work to reflect on their own clinical understanding and practice, and in their teaching. Beckett’s work in performance will offer a practical challenge to epistemologies and classifications current in medicine. Experts in the fields of psychiatry, neurology, philosophy and the theatre will then explore the ways in which theatre and literature can offer insights into mental and neurological disorders.

Programme

09.45 - 10.15	Coffee and Registration
10.15 - 10.30	Welcome / Introduction
10.30 - 11.00	Not I Event by Fail Better Productions
11.00 - 12.30	Parallel Session:
	Not I Workshop: Medical School (chair: Jonathan Heron/Matthew Broome) Not I Seminar: (chair: Elizabeth Barry and expert witnesses). This seminar will reflect on Beckett's play in relation to Gilles Deleuze's piece 'He Stuttered', which will be pre-circulated.
12.30 - 12.45	Feedback
12.45 - 01.30	Lunch
01.30 - 02.45	Panel 1: Theatre and Brain Science Jonathan Heron (chair) Dr Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (University of Oxford) Dr Hunter Groninger (National Institutes of Health, Maryland/ University of Virginia)
02.45 - 03.30	Panel 2: Psychiatry and the Humanities Dr Matthew Broome (chair/ interlocutor) Prof. Femi Oyebode (University of Birmingham) Dr Angela Woods (Durham University)
03.30 - 04.00	Tea
04.30 - 05.15	Round-table discussion:  Beckett and Brain Science: Theory and Practice Dr Elizabeth Barry (chair) Dr Jonathan Cole (University of Southampton) Dr Hunter Groninger (NIH/Virginia) Dr Ulrika Maude (University of Reading) Prof. Femi Oyebode (Birmingham) Dr Laura Salisbury (Birkbeck, University of London)

Booking

The event is free, but places are limited and booking is essential. To reserve a place, please contact Elizabeth Barry at e.c.barry@warwick.ac.uk.

Website

• Beckett and Brain Science
• Fail Better Productions

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Beckett and Brain Science: Free London Symposium
• Beckett and Brain Science: Free Reading Symposium
• Beckett and the Brain: Birkbeck Seminar

The Blue Velvet Project

A frame-by-frame analysis of David Lynch's unsettling masterpiece

A still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986)

A still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986)

A still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986)

A still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986)

A still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986)

A still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986)

A still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986)

There's a moment in David Lynch's 1986 film, Blue Velvet, where its protagonist, Jeffrey Beaumont, divulges: 'I'm in the middle of a mystery and it's all secret'. As the narrative unfolds, Jeffrey's obsession with clues leads him deeper into the dark and troubling heart of America's sunny suburbia.

In some strange way, I wonder whether Nicholas Rombes, author of The Blue Velvet Project, might have a thing or two in common with Lynch's curious hero. The project is a testament to both obsession and voyeurism, seizing a frame of Lynch's film every 47 seconds for description and analysis. Now completed, its website includes 149 shots from the film, all posted between 8 August 2011 and 10 August 2012. But in the same way that viewers of Lynch's film are implicated in Jeffrey's voyeurism, it's hard not to get sucked into Rombes' online archive of comments and associations.

What is most interesting to me about The Blue Velvet Project is the sheer volume of references that have been pulled or inferred from virtually every shot. Blue Velvet is, famously, a film that peels away the layers of suburban life, and Rombes manages to find evidence of this almost everywhere he looks. Whether he's examining the film in the context of 1980s politics, American cinema, or critical and theoretical responses to Lynch's work, his observations are often sharp and insightful.

The real achievement of the project is to bring out many of the subtleties of Lynch's masterpiece, whilst retaining our sense of its mysterious and secretive nature. It's a strange world. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Filmmakers: David Lynch
• David Lynch talks to Mike Figgis
• David Lynch on BBC's The Culture Show
• David Lynch on Ideas, Cinema and Billy Wilder
• Mysteries of Love: Documentary on Lynch and Blue Velvet
• Inside David Lynch's Club Silencio, Paris
• Is David Lynch Retiring from Film?

Ghérasim Luca, Self-Shadowing Prey

A new publication from Contra Mundum Press

Ghérasim Luca, Self-Shadowing Prey

The following is an announcement from Contra Mundum Press:

Self-Shadowing Prey

Announcing the first ever English translation of Self-Shadowing Prey, one of the final books of poems by the renowned Romanian surrealist Ghérasim Luca (1913-1994), and the first of Luca’s verse ever to be translated into English.

Self-Shadowing Prey is clearly constructed around the sought complications of language. Embodying the surrealist operation of play with considerable exactitude and rigor, Self-Shadowing Prey is rich with neologistic stupors, nouns made verbs, and compelling repetitions and linguistic expansions. Language is not merely put into play but made to participate in an erotic act, and words become the locus of an exploding self.

This linguistically-joyous text reveals the arresting syntactic creation and creative stammering which Deleuze and Guattari both saw in Luca and what led Deleuze to call him a great poet among the greatest. “If Ghérasim Luca’s speech is eminently poetic,” Deleuze pronounced, “it is because he makes stuttering an affect of language and not an affectation of speech. The entire language spins and varies in order to disengage a final block of sound, a single breath at the limit of the cry, JE T’AIME PASSIONNÉMENT.”

Transformed into English by distinguished translator Mary Ann Caws, this publication of Luca’s Self-Shadowing Prey gives us yet one more important text by a little-known but key figure of the Romanian branch of Surrealism

Video

Ghérasim Luca reads 'The Resting Whirlwind'.

Critical Responses

Ghérasim Luca is a great poet among the greatest: he invented a prodigious stammering, his own.

Gilles Deleuze

Mary Ann Caws' passionate translations render deft, delightful facets of the formidable Ghérasim Luca: virile servings of refreshment and tumult, liberating language from the yoke of Duty. Self-Shadowing Prey calls for vertiginous reading, in exhilarating reflection of the sonorous scintillations of Luca's own reading performances.

Julian and Laura Semilian, translators of Ghérasim Luca's The Inventor of Love & Other Works

Website

• Contra Mundum Press

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Contra Mundum Press
• Stuart Kendall translates Gilgamesh
• Rainer J. Hanshe, The Acolytes
• Rainer J. Hanshe on The Acolytes

Beckett and Brain Science: Free Reading Symposium

University of Reading, 27 April 2012

Design: Rhys Tranter

Beckett and Brain Science
AHRC-funded Symposium
University of Reading
27 April 2012

About the Seminar

The symposium will be held in the conference room of the University of Reading Special Collections. The building housing Special Collections and the Museum of English Rural Life is located in Redlands Road.

Timetable

Date & Time: Friday, 27 April 2012, 10.00 to 17.50

10.00 - 10.30	Coffee and Registration
10.30 - 11.30	'... but the brain...': Professor James Knowlson (University of Reading) and Dr Ulrika Maude (University of Reading) in Conversation
11.30 - 12.30	Dr Peter Fifield (St John's College, University of Oxford): 'Seeing Things: The Brain and the Archive'
12.30 - 13.15	Lunch
13.15 - 14.15	Professor Dirk Van Hulle (University of Antwerp): 'Beckett's Manuscripts and the Extended Mind: A Post-Cartesian what is the word'
14.15 - 15.15	Professor Mary Bryden (University of Reading): '"From Chaos to the Brain": Beckett and Deleuze'
15.15 - 15.45	Coffee
15.45 - 16.15	Jonathan Heron (University of Warwick, and Artistic Director, Fail Better Productions): '"Theatre Machines" and "Beckett's DNA"'
16.15 - 17.15	Professor Ronald Schleifer (University of Oklahoma): 'Modernism as Gesture: Popular Music and Performances of Literature'
17.15 - 17.30	Closing Words

Registration

There is no registration fee for ‘Beckett and Brain Science,’ but please send an email with the following registration details to Ulrika Maude at u.maude@reading.ac.uk:

Name:
Affiliation:
Address:
E-mail:

Accommodation

There are a limited number of rooms available in Black Horse House on the University campus. For bookings, please contact Miranda Hogg at blackhorsehouse@reading.ac.uk, tel. 0118 378 8906, quoting ‘Beckett and Brain Science’. The booking code is: 39450.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Samuel Beckett Research Day Seminar 2012
• Samuel Beckett Research Day Seminar 2010
• Samuel Beckett Research Day Seminar 2011
• Beckett and the 'State' of Ireland Conference (2012)
• Samuel Beckett Summer School 2012

Friedrich Kittler 1943-2011

Contemporary media theorist and literary critic passes away, aged 68

Friedrich Kittler

Report from media blog, Machinology (thanks to Volker Frick for the link): 'Writing anything after hearing about the death of Friedrich Kittler (1943-2011) is not really easy, even if it surely will boost the academic publishing industry into a range of publications. Somewhere I read him characterized as the “Derrida of media theory” and where the writer (probablyWinthrop-Young or Peters) added that of course, Kittler would like to be called “Foucault of media theory”.' [Read More]

Anthony Uhlmann, Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov

What can literature tell us about the thinking process?

Anthony Uhlmann, Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov

I'm always interested to hear about studies exploring the philosophical aspects of literature. So, you can imagine my curiosity when hearing about Anthony Uhlmann's forthcoming book, Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov (to be published in paperback on 29 September). The following is a press release from the publisher, Continuum, which includes brief overviews by Richard Begam and Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee:

In this ambitious contribution to literary theory, Anthony Uhlmann shows how a work of literature can be said to think, and thus in what sense literature helps us to understand the world. On the way he provides exemplary analyses of Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov at work, as well as useful unfoldings of difficult material from Spinoza and Leibniz.

J. M. Coetzee

Anthony Uhlmann offers an impressively original and compelling series of interpretations that will substantially alter accepted ideas not only of Joyce, Woolf and Nabokov, but also of the epistemology and aesthetics of modernism. Uhlmann‟s Deleuzian approach—post-expressionist and postrepresentationalist— seeks to move beyond the traditional conception of modernism as an “inward turn” centered in subjectivity and interiority. Thinking in Literature accomplishes its highly innovative readings with subtlety, intelligence and insight.

Richard Begam, Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Thinking in Literature examines how the Modernist novel might be understood as a machine for thinking, and how it offers means of coming to terms with what it means to think. It begins with a theoretical analysis, via Deleuze, Spinoza and Leibniz, of the concept of thinking in literature, and sets out three principle elements which continually announce themselves as crucial to the process of developing an aesthetic expression: relation; sensation; and composition. Uhlmann then examines the aesthetic practice of three major Modernist writers: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov. Each can be understood as working with relation, sensation and composition, yet each emphasize the interrelations between them in differing ways in expressing the potentials for thinking in literature.

Anthony Uhlmann is Professor of English in the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and coeditor of The Ethics of Arnold Geulincx (Brill, 2006). He is chief editor of The Journal of Beckett Studies.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Is Modernism Boring?
• Peter Childs, Modernism: A Guide for the Perplexed
• Shane Weller, Modernism and Nihilism
• Gabriel Josipovici, What Ever Happened to Modernism?

Gary Gutting, Thinking the Impossible

A survey of French philosophy since 1960

David Winters reviews Gary Gutting's Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960 over at ReadySteadyBook: 'Apart from its pedagogical context, what makes French thought ‘French,’ for Gutting – what unifies it, what sets it apart - is its persistent attention to a single, underlying theme: ‘thinking the impossible.’ This is the metaphilosophical meat of the book: the argument that, where analytic philosophers at least ‘act as if’ everything can be conceptually understood, the French are fascinated by limit cases, and are ‘sceptics about conceivability.’ [Read More]

Heidegger Kitsch

Graham Harman on imitated mannerisms of the German philosopher

Mark Thwaite of Ready Steady Book has drawn my attention to a recent post by Graham Harman at Object Oriented Philosophy: 'By now most people are familiar with the concept of Heidegger Kitsch: the aping of Heidegger’s verbal mannerisms without the soul of the thing being there. At times Heidegger himself even seems to lapse into this, such as in portions of the Beiträge and even more in lesser texts in the same vein such as Besinnung.' Harman also singles out the verbal and physical mannerisms of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Human, All Too Human: BBC's Martin Heidegger Documentary
• Heidegger and the Nazism Debate
• Simon Critchley on Martin Heidegger's Being and Time

Samuel Beckett Summer School: July 2011

Samuel Beckett Summer School
11-15 July 2011
Hosted by the School of Drama, Film and Music and the School of English,
Trinity College Dublin

About the Event

Trinity College Dublin is honoured to present the annual Samuel Beckett Summer School, a weeklong celebration and exploration of the works of one of its most famous graduates. Each year we will invite the world’s foremost Beckett scholars to present new lectures and seminars on all aspects of Beckett’s works. We hope that the School will appeal to a wide range of Beckett enthusiasts by providing the opportunity to savour and study Beckett’s works in the context of the university where he began his intellectual life.

The Summer School will run for one week in July/August, this year from 11 to 15 July. There will be two lectures in the morning and a choice of seminars will be available in the afternoon. In the first year we will run four seminars; enrolled students will choose which seminar they wish to attend when they register. One of the seminars will be a drama workshop and one will be a reading group. In the evenings we will offer a range of activities, which may include a performance of one of Beckett’s plays at the Samuel Beckett Theatre specially commissioned for the Summer School. The Library at Trinity College, which houses a significant collection of Beckett’s manuscripts, will prepare an exhibit for the Summer School.

Themes and Speakers

Each year the Summer School will have a unique theme, which will be addressed in one of the seminars and two of the lectures. The theme for 2011 will be Gilles Deleuze and Samuel Beckett.

Confirmed speakers for 2011 include: Linda Ben-Zvi, Ian Buchanan, Gerry Dukes, S.E. Gontarski, Barry McGovern, Mark Nixon, Sarah Jane Scaife, Dirk Van Hulle, and Shane Weller. The Patron of the Summer School is Edward Beckett.

Registration

Full information about the 2011 programme will be available on this website in September.

Registration for the 2011 Samuel Beckett Summer School will start in December 2010.

Contact

Official website: Samuel Beckett Summer School 2011

Sam Slote, slotes@tcd.ie
or
Stephen Wilmer, swilmer@tcd.ie

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Samuel Beckett: Podcasts from Debts and Legacies 2010
• Beckett Seminar 2011: Philosophy and Literature

Beckett Seminar 2011: Philosophy and Literature

April 7-10, 2011

Call for Papers
Seminar: Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature
Conference Date: April 7-10, 2011

Conference Venue: Hyatt New Brunswick, New
Brunswick, New Jersey
Conference Organizer: Arka Chattopadhyay

Selection of Confirmed Speakers:

Jean-Michel Rabate (The University of Pennsylvania)
Bataille and Beckett: from the Impossible to Unknowing.

James Martell (University of Notre Dame)
Derrida Beckettian specter

Richard Marshall (Institute of Education: London University)
The Illusory Nothing of Endon's Affence

Christopher Langlois (University of Western Ontario)
Approaching Beckettian Being: Badiou, Deleuze, and the Onto-Aesthetics of Worstward Ho

Sean F. Ward (Duke University)
Watt Subject: Beckett Reads “Bare” and “Creaturely Life”

Matthieu Protin (Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Samuel Beckett’s Drama: A Philosophical Theatre between Denial and Philosophy in Action

H. Peter Steeves (DePaul University)
The Space of a Door: Mourning, Memory, Madness, Beckett

Arka Chattopadhyay (Jadavpur University)
'Profounds of Mind': Thinking the Thought in Thought and Beckett's Locus of Stirrings

Deadline for Abstract Submission: Sept. 30, 2010
(300-500 words)

Notification of acceptance of papers by 5th of October, 2010.

Deadline for Final Paper Submission: March 15, 2011

Length of Full Papers: 4000-5000 words (The full papers are to be mutually exchanged and read well before the seminar and shortened 10 minute presentations, consisting of four double-spaced pages, are to be made in the session)

Seminar Description

The seminar seeks to explore the complex and paradoxical relationship between the discourses of philosophy and literature focusing on the works of Samuel Beckett. Beckett has had a long standing dialogue with philosophy. From comments like ‘I am not a philosopher’ and ‘I do not understand philosophy’ to his love of Democritus, Arnold Geulincx and Arthur Schopenhauer, from a rich texture of philosophical allusions in early works like Murphy to a more resistant non-allusive (or allusive in a very subterranean way) later prose like Worstward Ho, Beckett’s work has always been seen in relation to philosophy, from championing a certain kind of Cartesianism to reviving the latent philosophical discourses of the Atomists, from positing existentialism to parodying it and so on.

In the 20th century, Beckett’s oeuvre has attracted a handsome amount of philosophical attention with almost all major philosophers responding to his work in vastly different ways. From early readings of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot to the responses of the poststructuralists like Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, reactions from Adorno, Stanley Cavell, Julia Kristeva, Irigaray, Martha Nussbaum and in more recent times perhaps in the most extensive fashion in the writings of Alain Badiou, Simon Critchley and a host of others, Beckett has commanded a rigorous attention of the philosophers. They have sometimes cited Beckett by way of exemplifying their own philosophical conceptualization and problematization while on other occasions they have seen his work as a genuine philosophical repository, generating issues and debates, intrinsic to the discipline of philosophy.

Eminent Beckett Scholars like Ruby Cohn, Stanley Gontarski, Anthony Uhlmann, Garin Dowd and others have been sensitive to what we can call a ‘philosophical turn’ in the field known as Beckett Studies. Apart from dealing with the philosopher’s influence on Beckett from a biographical point of view and Beckett’s influence on 20th century philosophy, the seminar also encourages papers that see Beckett’s work as a topos where different and often contesting ways of conceiving the philosophy-literature interface meet each other. Beckett’s interest in classical philosophy and the supposed representational relation between philosophy and literature is on the one hand while on the other is the poststructuralist and postmodernist appropriation of his canon which tends to locate his body of work at the margin of philosophical thought. Samuel Beckett thus remains the fascinating literary icon that he is with Derrida defining an auto-deconstructive margin of philosophy in literature with Beckett and Badiou drawing on Beckett as an original philosophical thinker, who is instrumental in his discourse of a return to philosophy.

Therefore, the thrust-areas are (the abstracts may include these perspectives but need not be limited to these at all):

• Philosophy as influence on Beckett.
• Philosophy as intertextual cultural memory or a textual principle in Beckett.
• Beckett as an influence on 20th century Philosophy.
• Beckett’s texts as philosophy.
• Beckett’s texts as an anti-philosophical discourse.
• Beckett and the cognitive philosophical tradition.
• The politics of philosophical appropriation in and of Beckett texts.
• The philosophical categorization of Beckett as a Modernist polemic of canonization.
• The philosophical status of Beckett and its contribution in a supposed undermining of the pragmatics of his theatrical practice as a playwright and stage-artist.

(Audio/Visual requirements include a $10 handling fee with registration.)

All enquiries and abstracts are to be directly sent to:

Arka Chattopadhyay
M.Phil Scholar
Department of English
Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

Address:
Krishna, Flat-105
75, J.K. Street
Uttarpara, Hooghly
Pin-712258
Ph: 033-2663-8270
91-9231536815

Contact email:

Arka Chattopadhyay: arkaless@gmail.com

In Theory: Barthes' Death of the Author

Andrew Gallix unravels one of Roland Barthes' best known ideas

Founder of 3:AM Magazine begins a new series of articles on literary theory for The Guardian website. He begins with Roland Barthes influential essay, 'The Death of the Author':

I have chosen to inaugurate this series with a few considerations on "The Death of the Author" because of its truly iconic nature: it symbolises the rise of what would come to be known as "theory". Even if he never names them, Roland Barthes (like Proust before him) launches an attack on the traditional biography-based criticism à la Sainte-Beuve or Lanson which still dominated French academia in the sixties. The paradox, of course, is that this essay – with its symbolic slaying of the paternal "Author-God" – could lend itself to a textbook psychological reading given that Barthes lost his own father before his first birthday. The "Death of the Author" theme itself takes on added meaning, in hindsight, when you consider that Barthes's critical career was, at least in part, a displacement activity to avoid writing the novel he dreamed of. Does any of this invalidate his theories? I'll let you be the judge of that...

In 2002, the prestigious Pompidou Centre in Paris devoted a major exhibition, not to an artist, philosopher, scientist or novelist, but a literary critic: Roland Barthes. Now that the "theory wars" – which had once torn apart literature departments on both sides of the Atlantic – were largely over, it served as a reminder of a time when a posse of structuralists and post-structuralists superseded the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre as France's premier intellectual icons. Many of them were primarily philosophers, anthropologists, historians, linguists or psychoanalysts – Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva et al – but the locus of this intellectual revolution was undoubtedly literary criticism.

La nouvelle critique was flavour of the month, much like its culinary counterpart, nouvelle cuisine, albeit more of a mouthful. Critics-cum-thinkers such as Barthes himself – who was equally at home at the lofty Collège de France or down the trendy Le Palace nightclub – achieved bona fide celebrity status. Their works often became bestsellers in spite of their demanding and iconoclastic nature. Soon, NME journalists were peppering their articles with arcane references to Baudrillard while Scritti Politti dedicated a postmodern ditty to Jacques Derrida. The whole movement seemed as provocative, and indeed exciting, as Brigitte Bardot in her slinky, sex kitten heyday. Its defining moment was the publication of a racy little number called "The Death of the Author". [Read the Article]

Andrew Gallix, 'In theory: The Death of the Author'

guardian.co.uk, 13 January 2010