In Our Time: S21/18 Samuel Beckett (Jan 17 2019)

Samuel Beckett
In Our Time

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Samuel Beckett (1906 - 1989), who lived in Paris and wrote his plays and novels in French, not because his French was better than his English, but because it was worse. In works such as Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Molloy and Malone Dies, he wanted to show the limitations of language, what words could not do, together with the absurdity and humour of the human condition. In part he was reacting to the verbal omnipotence of James Joyce, with whom he’d worked in Paris, and in part to his experience in the French Resistance during World War 2, when he used code, writing not to reveal meaning but to conceal it.

With Steven Connor, Professor of English at the University of Cambridge; Laura Salisbury, Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Exeter; and Mark Nixon, Associate Professor in Modern Literature at the University of Reading and co-director of the Beckett International Foundation. Producer: Simon Tillotson.

READING LIST:

Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing and other Shorter Prose, 1950-1976 (Faber & Faber, 2010)

Samuel Beckett, Murphy (first published 1938; Faber & Faber, 2009)

George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck (eds.), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume 2. 1941–1956 (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck (eds.), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume 3. 1957–1965 (Cambridge University Press, 2014)

George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck (eds.), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume 4. 1966–1989 (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (eds.), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume 1. 1929–1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Andrew Gibson, Samuel Beckett (Reaktion Books, 2010)

S. E. Gontarski, A Companion to Samuel Beckett (Blackwell, 2010)

Hugh Kenner, A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett (Syracuse University Press, 1996)

James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (Bloomsbury, 1997)

James Knowlson and John Haynes, Images of Beckett (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Christopher Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words (Clarendon, 1990)

Laura Salisbury, Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing (Edinburgh University Press, 2015)

Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett's Library (Cambridge University Press, 2013)

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