Samuel Beckett and Technology by Kiryushina, Galina; Adar, Einat; Nixon, Mark;

Short description:

This collection of essays is the first comprehensive discussion of the role technology plays in shaping Beckett’s trademark aesthetics.

Long description:

This collection of essays is the first comprehensive discussion of the role technology plays in shaping Beckett’s trademark aesthetics. Samuel Beckett and Technology assembles an innovative and diverse range of scholarly approaches to the topic, which collectively renegotiate our understanding of his work in prose, theatre, film, radio and television. What emerges from these discussions is the centrality of technology for Beckett’s creative imagination, a factor that is equally enabling as it is limiting. At the same time, the book reveals how theories of technology can yield new readings of the way Beckett responds to the conditions of technological modernity. As such, Beckett’s work is examined in its relation to historical and contemporary technologies, discourses of technicity and technē, post-humanism, and the digital age.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments Preface - Clas Zilliacus

Introduction: ‘Up to the neck in technical muck’: The Enduring Success of Beckett’s Technological Failures - Galina Kiryushina, Einat Adar and Mark Nixon

Part I: Mechanical and Electrical Technologies

1. The Unmaking of Homo Faber: Beckett and the Exhaustion of Technē - Shane Weller

2. The Permanent Way: Movement and Stasis in Beckett’s Railways - Feargal Whelan

3. ‘with the mechanics of which I am unfamiliar’: The Strangeness of Technology in Beckett - Dúnlaith Bird

4. Beckett and La Mettrie: From Man a Machine to a Techno-Human Being - Céline Thobois

5. Monadic Clocks in Samuel Beckett’s Quad: Decomposing ‘Dramatised Taboo’ - Naoya Mori

Part II: Media Technologies and Intermediality

6. Beckett’s Technography: Traces of Radio in the Later Prose - Pim Verhulst

7. Beckett’s Words and Music, ‘or some other trouble’: Vagenuing on the Airwaves - Lucy Jeffery

8. ‘A medium for fleas’: Beckett, Mitrani and 1950s–1960s French Television Drama - Galina Kiryushina

9. Beckett’s Multimedial Authorship: Language of Technology in the Genesis of Play and Film - Olga Beloborodova

10. Beckett and Television: Anachronism as Innovation - Jonathan Bignell

11. Making and Remaking Samuel Beckett’s What Where - Walter Asmus

Part III: Ideas of Technology

12. Portals of Invention: A ‘Techno-Logical’ Reading of the Prometheus Figure in Beckett's The Unnamable - Thomas Thoelen

13. Technology and the Naïve Artist: Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape - Michael D’Arcy

14. Beckett’s Invisible Matter: Echo, Technology and Posthuman Affect - Ruben Borg

15. Digital Poetics and Digital Hermeneutics in Beckett Studies: Toward a Manuscript Chronology - Dirk Van Hulle

CodaViral Beckett - Nicholas Johnson Notes on ContributorsIndex