Professional Documents
Culture Documents
BECKETT
SUMMER
SCHOOL
SAMUEL
BECKETT
SUMMER
SCHOOL
PROGRAMME
of the 2016 Samuel Beckett Summer School
7 12 August 2016
TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
The School of English &
The School of Drama, Film and Music
Front Gate of
Trinity College
Graduate
Memorial
Building (GMB)
Nassau Street
Gate (campus
access to Arts
Building)
Old Library
(Launch Event)
Players Theatre
and Samuel
Beckett Theatre
Arts Building
Dunne &
Crescenzi
Trinity Long
Room Hub
(Lectures)
Pearse Street
DART Station
Goldsmith
Hall (rooms)
Table of Venues
SUMMER SCHOOL ACADEMIC PROGRAMME:
Graduate Memorial Building (GMB) Arrival Registration, Welcome Event
Trinity Long Room Hub (First Floor) Morning Lectures, Manuscripts Seminar, Plenaries
Samuel Beckett Centre (Players Theatre) Performance Workshop / Beckett Laboratory
The Old Library (The Long Room) Monday Launch Event
Arts Building: Bilingual Beckett (3071), Beckett & Music (3106)
SUMMER SCHOOL PUBLIC PROGRAMME AND PERFORMANCES:
Samuel Beckett Centre (Samuel Beckett Theatre) Mouth on Fire, Olwen Four, Pan Pan
General Post Office (GPO, off campus: OConnell Street) Barry McGovern
Trinity Long Room Hub (Neill Lecture Theatre) Catherine Laws
Monday 8 August
Monday 8 August
Tuesday 9 August
Thursday 11 August
Wednesday 10 August
Wednesday 10 August
Thursday 13 August
Tuesday 9 August
Friday 12 August
Friday 14 August
FULL SCHEDULE
SUNDAY 7 AUGUST 2016
PUBLIC PROGRAMME / LINKING EVENT MOUTH ON FIRE
4.00pm - 5.15pm, Samuel Beckett Theatre:
What Would I Do Without This Silence / Cad A Dhanfainn Gan An Tost Seo
Becketts Poetry in Irish, French, and English, created by Mouth on Fire
An event supported by UNESCO/City of Literature and Foras na Gaeilge
REGISTRATION and WELCOME RECEPTION
5.30pm - 7.00pm, Graduate Memorial Building (GMB):
Registration for Summer School opens, reception for registered participants
Introduction of 2016 Faculty
7.30pm onward, Doyles Pub, College Green (entrance off Fleet Street):
All students, staff, and friends of the Summer School welcome
will be discussed and applied to Becketts manuscripts. The potential interpretive consequences of this
genetic research will be discussed in the second part of the seminar.
Bilingual Beckett (Nadia Louar) One of the most remarkable traits of Becketts literary corpus is the fact that
it comes in two versions. The mythologized turn to French on the 13th of March 1946, when Beckett drew a
line in the manuscript of Suite to continue in French the novella that he had started in English a month
earlier, does not truly mark Becketts birth as a major French writer. Becketts first literary forays into
French began in the late thirties when he wrote poetry. Similarly, the return to English in 1956 with a radio
play and a prose fragment (the first text written directly in English since Watt according to its author) omits
the fact that he had been translating himself back into English since the 1950s. It is, however, customary to
distinguish three periods in Becketts linguistic itinerary, the English prewar prose, the turn to French, and
the return to English. In our seminars, we will examine the part played by bilingualism in Becketts literature
and the aesthetic implications of such a literary choice. One of the main questions we will explore is how the
practice of self-translation relates to other forms of rewriting that take place in the course of Becketts career
as novelist, playwright, screenwriter and director. We will read selections from each period and look at the
most recent critical studies. While some knowledge of French might be helpful, it is not required.
Beckett and Music (Catherine Laws) Samuel Beckett was a lover of music. He enjoyed playing the piano,
was married to a professional pianist, and regularly attended concerts. His listening tastes were broad, but
his great love was for music of the late Classical and early Romantic periods, especially Beethoven and
Schubert, and in some of his work he references particular compositions or even, occasionally, includes
excerpts of the music itself. He also thought hard about music. His early writing includes occasional, often
obscure references to music history, philosophy and theory, and in some of this we can observe Beckett
explicitly thinking about or through music in order to work out the kind of writing he wants to produce:
to help him find his literary voice. A musical attention to the detail of sound and its patterning seems
increasingly to seep into the very pores of his language. As his voices fizzle on with their broken, empty,
repetitive, hopeless and often very funny attempts to tell stories, the language fragments and fissures.
But whether truncated and percussive, or accumulative and spieling, the closer Beckett seems to get to
exhaustion and silence, the more musical the impact of the language. This was important to Beckett:
rehearsing Footfalls with Rose Hill, Beckett announced: We are not doing this play realistically or
psychologically, we are doing it musically. In the seminars we will explore three different aspects of the
topic Beckett and music: the musicality of Becketts writing, his use of and references to music, and some of
the ways in which composers have responded to Becketts texts.
Beckett Performance Workshop / Samuel Beckett Laboratory (Jonathan Heron and Nicholas Johnson) The
Samuel Beckett Laboratory, in partnership with DU Players, provides a space and occasion for fundamental
research into Becketts work in and through performance. Meeting annually through the five days of the
Beckett Summer School, the Lab occupies a black-box theatre to create an ensemble of students, scholars,
performers, directors, designers, and technicians to explore the problems and practices of Beckett in
performance. The Lab is founded on the simple principle that by approaching Becketts texts through
performance, deeper insight into the texts function or meaning can be gained. This function of performance
as a methodology is taken as a truism for playscripts, where it is widely agreed that the kinaesthetic or
practical knowledge achieved by the performer, director, designer, or technician is a valuable aspect of
attaining a deep understanding of the work. The Lab applies this principle across genre to include prose,
poetry, radio, television, film, correspondence, and manuscript/draft material. The Lab exists to cultivate a
safe and facilitated environment where, for the purpose of both research and pedagogy, scholars can engage
in an inclusive manner with all of Becketts writing as performance material. The focus for 2016 will be
sound in Beckett; especially the practical exploration of Becketts soundscapes with reference to recorded
voice, sound design and musical score. The source texts for these experiments will be Krapps Last Tape (1958)
and Cascando (1963). With two facilitators creating a working environment that elevates the non-hierarchical
and exploratory embodiment of the ensemble, the workshop participants are all invited to respond
through performance, reflecting on possible elements of dramaturgy, design, acting, and directing of the
selected piece. Over the course of five days of engagement with the source texts and various performance
practices, this approach is designed to generate a form of deep knowledge of the texts structure, crossreference, and operation as a living thought that can be embodied or communicated in manifold ways to
an audience.
Following its expansion to include public events in 2012, the Beckett Summer School will
again programme a number of events that the wider public may attend. Access to all of
these events is free for registered students and staff members of the Summer School; it
is not necessary for participants to book online. The Beckett Summer School gratefully
acknowledges the support of the UNESCO/City of Literature in this performance
programme, as well as in-kind and development support from An Post, the Trinity Long
Room Hub, RT, Foras na Gaeilge, the Samuel Beckett Theatre, DU Players, and the Arts
Council.
UPTHEREPUBLIC!
READINGS by BARRY McGOVERN in the GPO
7:00 PM, Tuesday 9 August 2016 / General Post Office (GPO), OConnell Street, Dublin 1
The Beckett Summer School 2016 is pleased to partner with the GPO in the centenary year of the Rising, and
to offer an opportunity to experience one of Dublin's most historic locations. Barry McGovern, a worldrenowned interpreter of Samuel Beckett's work, will present texts that reflect Beckett's troubled relationship
to Irish nationalism, including one featuring the GPO itself.
Feargal Whelan will introduce the venue and the performer and moderate the discussion.
All tickets for this event are standing only. It will be followed by a wine reception.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Barry McGovern is recognised by many as one
of the leading interpreters of the work of
Samuel Beckett. He has played Vladimir,
Estragon and Lucky in Waiting for Godot, Clov
in Endgame, Willie in Happy Days and Krapp in
Krapps Last Tape. On radio he has played
Henry in Embers, Fox in Rough for Radio II and
directed All that Fall. He has also played
Words in Words and Music.
He played
Vladimir in the Beckett on Film Godot. In 2012
he played Vladimir to Alan Mandells
Estragon in Los Angeles and earlier this year
played Clov to his Hamm. His two one-man Beckett shows Ill Go On and Watt, produced by the Gate
Theatre, have toured worldwide. He frequently lectures on, and gives readings of, Becketts work. His
recordings of the complete Three Novels (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable) are available from RT.
Last year he taught Joyce and Beckett at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. He will be performing a
stage adaptation of Beckett's First Love at the Dublin Theatre Festival in October.
Centre 2016) ; Catastrophe (Gate Theatre Dublin and Barbican Beckett Festival 2007) ; Play and Come
and Go (Gate Theatre Dublin and Lincoln Center NY 1997); Not I (Focus Theatre, Dublin 1979);
Endgame (in Players Theatre,TCD, 1976).
Jonathan Heron is a theatre practitioner and performance scholar, based at the University of
Warwick as the IATL Principal Teaching Fellow. He was previously Research Associate for the
CAPITAL Centre (with the Royal Shakespeare Company) and Youth Arts Leader at Pegasus
Theatre in Oxford, during their 50th anniversary. His theatre directing includes: Diary of a Madman
(Warwick Arts Centre), The Nativity & Mythologies (Pegasus, Oxford), Rough for Theatre II & Ohio
Impromptu (Burton Taylor, Oxford Playhouse), Play without a Title (Belgrade, Coventry), and
Phaedras Love (Underbelly, Edinburgh). He was also Associate Director on Footfalls and Rockaby
(Den Nationale Scene, Bergen; 2012) performed by Rosemary Pountney, with whom he
collaborated on several Beckett projects. Jonathan founded Fail Better Productions in 2001 and the
Warwick Student Ensemble in 2009. With Nicholas Johnson, he co-founded the Samuel Beckett
Laboratory and co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies (23:1, 2014). He has also
published research on early modern drama (Cambridge University Press, 2012; 2015) and the
medical humanities (BMJ, 2015; Springer, 2016). He was co-convenor for the International
Federation of Theatre Research Performance-as-Research working group (201316) and a core
member of the interdisciplinary research project Modernism, Medicine and the Embodied Mind
(Universities of Bristol, Exeter and Warwick, 201516).
Nicholas Johnson is Assistant Professor in Drama at TCD, as well as a performer, director, and
writer. Recent Beckett practice includes Cascando with Pan Pan (Beckett Theatre, 2016), Nos Knife
with Lisa Dwan (Lincoln Center, 2015), and the ongoing practice-as-research project Ill Seen Ill Said
with Scott Hamilton and Matthew Causey. He co-conceived and performed in Abstract Machines:
The Televisual Beckett (ATRL, 2010) and Three Dialogues (ATRL, 2011). In 2012 he directed Ethica: Four
Shorts by Samuel Beckett, presenting Play, Come and Go, Catastrophe, and What Where in Bulgaria,
Dublin, the Enniskillen Festival 2013, and ras an Uachtairin for World Human Rights Day. He
co-edited the Journal of Beckett Studies special issue on performance (23.1, 2014) with Jonathan
Heron. He is a founding co-director of the Beckett Summer School and co-convenor of the Samuel
Beckett Working Group for IFTR. In 2016 he held a visiting research fellowship at Yale University.
Nadia Louar is Associate Professor in French and Francophone Studies at the University of
Wisconsin Oshkosh. She has published essays on Becketts works, literary bilingualism and selftranslation, and on questions of genre and gender in translation. She is the author of Figures du
bilinguisme dans luvre de Samuel Beckett (2016). She is currently preparing a volume on The Poetics
of Bilingualism in Becketts Works, co-edited with Dr. Jose Francisco Fernndez, and rewriting her
monograph in English.
Rnn McDonald is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of New South Wales,
Sydney. Between 2010 and 2015, he held the Australian Ireland Fund Chair in Irish Studies at
UNSW and since, 2012, has been the President of the Irish Studies Association of Australia and
New Zealand. His research interests span modern Irish literature and culture, modernism, theories
of cultural value and the role of the humanities in the modern university. He is the editor of a new
collection of essays The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas (Cambridge
University Press, 2016). Other books include Tragedy and Irish Literature (2002), The Cambridge
Introduction to Samuel Beckett(2007) andThe Death of the Criticin(2008). He is co-editor of Flann
OBrien and Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2014).
Barry McGovern is recognised by many as one of the leading interpreters of the work of Samuel
Beckett. He has played Vladimir, Estragon and Lucky in Waiting for Godot, Clov in Endgame, Willie
in Happy Days and Krapp in Krapps Last Tape. On radio he has played Henry in Embers, Fox in
Rough for Radio II and directed All that Fall. He has also played Words in Words and Music. He
played Vladimir in the Beckett on Film Godot. In 2012 he played Vladimir to Alan Mandells
Estragon in Los Angeles and earlier this year played Clov to his Hamm. His two one-man Beckett
shows Ill Go On and Watt, produced by the Gate Theatre, have toured worldwide. He frequently
lectures on, and gives readings of, Becketts work. His recordings of the complete Three Novels
(Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable) are available from RT. Last year he taught Joyce and
Beckett at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. He will be performing a stage adaptation of
Beckett's First Love at the Dublin Theatre Festival in October. This marks his sixth appearance at the
Beckett Summer School.
Angela Moorjani is Professor Emerita of French and Intercultural Studies at the University of
Maryland-UMBC and has been a visiting professor at Waseda University in Tokyo. She authored
Abysmal Games in the Novels of Samuel Beckett in 1982 on narrative mise en abyme, the fort-da, and
other playful repetitions; she has since co-edited seven volumes on Beckett, with the latest Beckett
in Conversation, yet again to appear in time for Becketts 110th birthday in 2016. Her other books
on mourning and repetition in writing and the arts The Aesthetics of Loss and Lessness and Beyond
Fetishism and Other Excursions in Pragmatics and numerous essays fuse psychoanalysis and
pragmatics with gender theory. Her recent publications include a study of the trilogy in The New
Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett and a series on Becketts French cultural ghosts leading her
to grapple further with the clash between Becketts ghostly timelessness and embodied
temporality in the space of writing. With Sjef Houppermans, she is co-editor in chief of the
bilingual journal Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourdhui.
Mark Nixon is Associate Professor in Modern Literature at the University of Reading, where he is
also Director of the Beckett International Foundation. With Dirk Van Hulle, he is editor in chief of
the Journal of Beckett Studies and Co-Director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. He is also an
editor of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourdhui and the current President of the Samuel Beckett Society.
He has published widely on Becketts work; recent books include the monograph Samuel Becketts
German Diaries 1936-37 (Continuum, 2011), the edited collection Publishing Samuel Beckett (British
Library, 2011) and Samuel Becketts Library, written with Dirk Van Hulle (Cambridge UP, 2013). His
critical edition of Becketts short story Echos Bones was published by Faber in April 2014. He is
currently preparing critical editions of Becketts Critical Writings (with David Tucker; Faber) and
Becketts German Diaries (with Oliver Lubrich; Suhrkamp), as well as The Bloomsbury Companion to
Modernist Literature (with Ulrika Maude; Bloomsbury, 2015).
David Pattie is Professor of Drama at the University of Chester. He is the author of The Complete
Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett (Routledge, 2001); Rock Music in Performance (Palgrave 2007) and
Modern British Playwrights: The 1950s (Methuen 2012). He has also co-edited two collections in
popular music: Kraftwerk: Music Non-Stop (Continuum, 2011) and Brian Eno: Oblique Music
(Continuum, 2016). He has published on Beckett, contemporary theatre and performance, popular
music, and popular culture; and he was part of a major three-year AHRC funded project (Staging
Beckett) which examined productions of Beckett in the UK and Ireland.
Sam Slote is Associate Professor in English at Trinity College Dublin and is a Fellow of Trinity
College Dublin. He has co-edited five volumes on Joyce: Probes: Genetic Studies in Joyce (1995);
Genitricksling Joyce (1999), How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-by- Chapter Genetic Guide
(University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), Renascent Joyce (University of Miami Press, 2013), and
Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts (SUNY Press, 2013). His annotated edition of Ulysses was
published by Alma Classics in 2012. His writings on Beckett have appeared in the Journal of Beckett
Studies, Samuel Beckett in Context, and Publishing Samuel Beckett. He is a Co-Director of the Samuel
Beckett Summer School.
Dirk Van Hulle is professor of English literature at the University of Antwerp (Centre for
Manuscript Genetics). His recent publications include the monographs Modern Manuscripts: The
Extended Mind and Creative Undoing (2014) and (with Shane Weller) The Making of Samuel Becketts
LInnommable/The Unnamable (2014). With Mark Nixon, he is co-director of the Beckett Digital
Manuscript Project (BDMP, www.beckettarchive.org), author of Samuel Becketts Library (CUP,
2013), and editor in chief of the Journal of Beckett Studies. He is currently preparing the second
edition of the Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (CambridgeUP).
Feargal Whelan was awarded a PhD by University College Dublin in 2014 with a thesis titled
Samuel Beckett and the Irish Protestant Imagination. He co-founded and co-organised the series
of conferences Samuel Beckett and the State of Ireland which were held annually in Dublin from
2011 to 2013. At present he is co-editing the conference proceedings for publication. He has
presented on Beckett at conferences in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Canada and Spain, including
at the Beckett Society panel at this years MLA, and has published in various journals. At present
he is research associate at UCD Humanities Institute in Dublin. Feargal has led the tour of the
Beckett Country for the last three years of the Samuel Beckett Summer School.
Artist biographies for the Mouth on Fire event can be found in the Sunday event programme.
www.beckettsummerschool.com
(and join our Facebook and Twitter accounts for regular updates).
MAJOR SPONSORS
The School of English and the School of Drama, Film, and Music, TCD
The Trinity Long Room Hub Research Institute for the Humanities
Larry and Mary Lund