Beckett and Media

This collection of essays stages a dialogue between leading Beckett scholars and media theorists and offers the first sustained critical enquiry into Beckett as a media artist and his intermedial work. This book offers the first sustained examination of the relations between Beckett and media technologies. It brings together some of the leading scholars who have focused on the nexus between Beckett and media while providing a platform for media theorists from outside of Beckett studies who have demonstrated a strong interest in his work.Greatly enlarging the scope of earlier discussions concerned with the mass media forms of broadcasting and cinema, this volume explores those actions, operations, artefacts and technologies that enable interaction across distances of time and space and that animate Beckett’s work across genres and art forms. As such, this book intervenes in the growing debate around Beckett, media and intermediality. The chapters analyse the rich variety of technical objects, semiotic arrangements, communication processes and forms of data processing that Beckett’s work so uniquely engages with, as well as those that – in historically changing configurations – determine the continuing performance, the audience reception and the scholarly study of this work. What these analyses have in common is a willingness to take a step back and peek behind the surface effects of representation, to scrutinise the infrastructural foundations and material processes that undergird them. They all share the conviction that we need to transcend the fixation on the discursive aspects of culture. These varied, and at times unorthodox, approaches illuminate Beckett’s work from an entirely new angle. The twelve essays assembled in this volume will be of interest to students and researchers in both media and Beckett studies as well as cultural history. Beckett and media provides the first sustained examination of the relationship between Beckett and media technologies. The book analyses the rich variety of technical objects, semiotic arrangements, communication processes and forms of data processing that Beckett’s work so uniquely engages with, as well as those that – in historically changing configurations – determine the continuing performance, the audience reception, and the scholarly study of this work. Beckett and media draws on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, such as media archaeology, in order to discuss Beckett’s intermedial oeuvre. As such, the book engages with Beckett as a media artist and examines the way his engagement with media technologies continues to speak to our cultural situation.An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.