Downloads | Tickets for Public Events | About | Call for Papers (CFP)
Download the conference report compiled by Bryan Radley and Deborah Russell
Conference ReportDownload the special issue of Modernism/modernity (18.4), guest edited by Peter Fifield, Bryan Radley, and Lawrence Rainey
Beckett: Out of the Archive special issue at Project Muse Table of Contents for the Beckett: Out of the Archive special issueDownload Promotional Posters
Out of the Archive Conference Poster Out of the Archive: Coetzee & Banville Poster Out of the Archive: John Minihan Exhibition Poster Out of the Archive: Musical Performances PosterTickets for Public Events
Please note that members of the public do not have to register for the academic conference in order to attend the five festival events: the John Minihan exhibition (16-26 June); performances by Gare St Lazare Players (22 and 24 June); the John Banville reading (23 June); the J. M. Coetzee reading (24 June); and the 'Beckett in Music' concert (25 June).Tickets are not required for the exhibition, while free tickets for the reading, lecture, and plays are available through the University of York's Festival of Ideas website: http://yorkfestivalofideas.com/tickets/
Concert tickets (£10/£5) can be purchased from the York Concerts box office: http://www.york.ac.uk/concerts/programme/
*** Ticket Update on 5 May ***
Please note that free public tickets for the two plays and the Banville reading have sold out. However, more tickets for the Banville event will be made available in an overspill theatre with live video streaming shortly. Please keep checking the Festival of Ideas website for more information.About the Conference & Festival
Samuel Beckett’s is one of the last great modernist archives. A vast, slowly emerging body of archival materials is enabling a “thick description” that details Beckett’s transformation of modern literature. Revised or previously unreleased texts, adaptations of unfamiliar works, and the recent publication of his arresting letters have revealed unsuspected reading habits and writing methods, and documented his immersion in specific intellectual and political contexts. This increasingly historical and empirical vision of Beckett seems at odds with the timelessness and universality presumed in earlier accounts of his work.“Out of the Archive” probes the implications of this contradiction by thoroughly reassessing Beckett’s oeuvre. It tests his own universalist belief that “the artist who stakes his being is from nowhere,” against his equally candid embrace of the specific, the material, “the straws, flotsam, etc., names, dates, births and deaths, because that is all I can know.” Doing so now is especially timely when the wider field of modernist studies is increasingly attuned to the quotidian and the ordinary. Rejecting accounts that trace realist conventions withering before a blaze of self-conscious interiority, recent studies (Liesl Olson, 2009; Siobhan Phillips, 2010) underscore how modernist works dwell in the regularity of the ordinary. The daily doings of Winnie, or Didi and Gogo, are not inept responses to cosmic darkness; they are ordinary experience, the subject matter of modernism.
“Out of the Archive” embodies a pluralist embrace of artists, creative writers, theatre practitioners, and working scholars, bringing their specialist expertise into dialogue with a wider public through multiple media. To this end, the conference will be showcased by a series of events free and open to the public, events that speak to both Beckett’s contemporaneity and his historicity. Special Guests will include the Nobel-Prize winning author J. M. Coetzee, the Man Booker-Prize winning novelist John Banville, and Beckett’s former publisher John Calder. John Minihan, whose images of Beckett in Paris and London have become iconic, will introduce an exhibition of his photographs of notable stage productions. Similarly, we hope to announce soon details of an exciting performance event, one that will provide people from across the region with a fresh introduction to Beckett. As well as twenty invited papers, some 200 academics from over thirty countries will also participate.
The key events will be captured on video and in a special issue of Modernism/modernity, the premier journal in the field. Overall we believe that this project will set a benchmark in Beckett studies and modernist studies.
Second Call for Papers (CFP)
The call for papers is now closed. Thank you for all of your submissions."My texts are in a terrible mess"*
In the wake of his 2006 centenary, Samuel Beckett’s prestige has continued to grow. His work has a continuing resonance in the public sphere, as the recent high-profile publication of the first volume of his letters shows, and the field of Beckett studies remains central to developments in the understanding of modernism. Beckett’s oeuvre is also celebrated for its transcendence of specific cultural and historical contexts, a situation that appears to pull against his increasing historical importance.
A major gathering of academics, artists, and writers, the conference will take up the question of how to place Beckett as a late modernist. We shall encourage a dialogue between frequently polarized critical approaches, asking what sort of Beckett we want out of the archive. Despite the complexity of the still-growing archives, their intellectual force is only beginning to be examined. Is Beckett’s work rejuvenated or embalmed by historical treatment, and does his continued importance to theory mark a point of resistance or potential for an historical approach? Is Beckett saved by, or must he be saved from, the archive?
Suggested topics for papers include:
- Beckett’s position within modernism and modernist studies
- How emerging methodologies inform our use and understanding of the archive
- The status of the ‘grey’ canon and the boundaries of the oeuvre
- Beckett’s cultural, economic, and political capital now
- How models of influence are sustained by and/or undermined by Beckett’s work
- The complexities of Beckett’s national and intellectual contexts
Contact
Conference Organizers:Peter Fifield (St John’s College, University of Oxford)
Bryan Radley (University of York)
Lawrence Rainey (University of York)
Beckett.outofthearchive@gmail.com (NB: this address is no longer monitored)
