Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui – serie

This issue of Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui collects a range of essays reflecting the diversity of Beckett Studies, many of which were presented at the conference in Reading to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Beckett International Foundation.Contributors are: Jonathan Bignell, Edward Bizub, María José Carrera, Conor Carville, Amanda Dennis, Peter Fifield, Lasse Gammelgaard, Scott Eric Hamilton, Tim Lawrence, Georgina Nugent-Folan, John Pilling, Siobhan Purcell, Rodney Sharkey, Paul Stewart, Rhys Tranter, Pim Verhulst.

SBT/A 19 features selected papers from the Borderless Beckett / Beckett sans frontières Symposium held in Tokyo at Waseda University in 2006. The essays penned by eminent and young scholars from around the world examine the many ways Beckett’s art crosses borders: coupling reality and dream, life and death, as in Japanese Noh drama, or transgressing distinctions between limits and limitlessness; humans, animals, virtual bodies, and stones; French and English; words and silence; and the received frameworks of philosophy and aesthetics.The highlight of the volume is the contribution by Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee, the special guest of the Symposium. His article entitled “Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett” introduces a variety of novel approaches to Beckett, ranging from a comparative analysis of his work and Melville’s Moby Dick to a biographical observation concerning Beckett’s application for a lectureship at a South African university. Other highlights include innovative essays by the plenary speakers and panelists – Enoch Brater, Mary Bryden, Bruno Clément, Steven Connor, S. E. Gontarski, Evelyne Grossman, and Angela Moorjani – and an illuminating section on Beckett’s television dramas.The Borderless Beckett volume renews our awareness of the admirable quality and wide range of approaches that characterize Beckett studies.

The thematic part of this volume of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui is devoted mainly to Beckett’s texts of the forties and later, and particularly to those he composed after his adoption of the French language. The essays presented in this part of the current issue attempt to see Beckett as a writer among other authors with whom he connects or competes, to examine his relations with artists, whether Beckett stimulates them or is stimulated by them, and to define his ‘posture’ and his position in the cultural field. How does the budding francophone writer position himself in the cultural field during his difficult beginnings and after his first successes? How can he be situated in relation to the three cultures he is dealing with? What are the parallels between Beckett’s own texts and those of other writers (literary and philosophical), but also between his work and the work of artists of the period? The ten essays in the free-space section of this volume also mainly concern his texts that were first written in French, and situate Beckett in relation to different topics, from Dante to the ‘War on Terror.’