Samuel Beckett and Technology

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.

Galina Kiryushina is a doctoral candidate and researcher at the Centre for Irish Studies, Charles University Prague. Her current research focuses on intermediality in the work of Samuel Beckett, in particular on the transitions between the media of film and television and Beckett’s late prose. Her essays on Beckett and cinema have appeared as journal articles and book chapters, most recently in Beckett and Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui (32:1; 2020).

Doctoral candidate and researcher at the Centre for Irish Studies

Einat Adar is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice. She was awarded a PhD from Charles University Prague in 2017 for a thesis examining Beckett’s lifelong engagement with Berkeley’s philosophy and its influence on his literary production in prose, theatre, and film. Her work explores the interface between philosophy and Irish modernism, and has been published in the essay collections Flann O’Brien: Gallows Humour and Tradition and Modernity: New Essays in Irish Studies, which she also co-edited, as well as in the journals Partial Answers and Estudios Irlandeses.

Mark Nixon is Associate Professor in Modern Literature at the University of Reading, where he is also Co-Director of the Beckett International Foundation. With Dirk Van Hulle, he is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Beckett Studies, Co-Director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project and editor of the book series ’Elements in Beckett Studies’ (CUP). He is also a former President of the Samuel Beckett Society. He has authored or edited more than ten books on Beckett’s work; recent publications include Samuel Beckett’s Library (with Dirk Van Hulle, Cambridge UP, 2013) and the critical edition of Beckett’s short story Echo’s Bones (Faber, 2014). He is currently preparing a critical edition of Beckett’s ’German Diaries’ (with Oliver Lubrich; Suhrkamp, 2022).