Post-Doc, School of Arts, Histories and Cultures
Thesis Title: Samuel Beckett, Intertextuality, and the Bible
About
My research at present focuses on Samuel Beckett, and considers in particular how intertextuality, both as a theory of language and as a practical approach to textual scholarship, impacts on a number of different critical issues raised by the Beckett oeuvre. My first book-length study centres on the relationship between Beckett's work and the Bible. In the first place this constitutes a detailed examination of the Bible's particular qualities as a text, book or cultural artefact in relation to Beckett (so differentiating itself from studies with a theological impetus, or which read for thematic concerns like suffering, judgement, birth, death, love). While always focusing on the specificity of the Bible as an object for this kind of analysis, the study also intervenes in ongoing theoretical and methodological debates about intertextuality.
The study deals substantially with archival material, and looks to account for the differing ways intertextuality works in Beckett's various mediums (from criticism to drama to drafts). It also argues for the reconsideration of a current imbalance between the Bible's status in his French as opposed to his English works. In other words, the book engages with the expansive nature of what is called the Beckett oeuvre. Secondly, it examines the fact that the Bible has come to be treated as a familiar object in Beckett, its far-reaching presence almost a matter of common knowledge. I argue that the Bible's involvement in a history of ubiquity and familiarity affects not only the broad interpretation of its significance in Beckett's work, but also the way that discrete elements of his writing come to be counted as biblical allusions, citations or residua. Consequently, I maintain that the oeuvre is not to be imagined like a mine, holding biblical seams that have yet to be exhaustively excavated by Beckett scholarship. While contributing a wealth of newly disclosed correspondences between Beckett and the Bible, the book also subjects to critique the idea of discovery to which such observations are very often annexed.
Ongoing research interests that are taken up in this project include reading Beckett politically and historically (which also means in the field of social production), theory and practice of archival research and its relation to intertextuality, theories of affect (beginning in a consideration of blasphemy and injured feelings), and a rethinking of intertextual materiality. These interests also inform my broader research focus on modernist literature. Besides Beckett, I have given papers on Mikhail Bakhtin and on tragedy and the figure of the child in W.B.Yeats's poetry.
