Emilie Morin

Beckett's Political Imagination by Emilie Morin

Beckett’s Political Imagination charts unexplored territory: it investigates how Beckett’s bilingual texts reimagine political history, and documents the conlicts and controversies through which Beckett’s political consciousness and airmations were mediated. The book ofers a startling account of Beckett’s work, tracing the many political causes that framed his writing, commitments, collaborations and friendships, from the Scottsboro Boys to the Black Panthers, from Irish communism to Spanish republicanism to Algerian nationalism, and from campaigns against Irish and British censorship to antiapartheid and international human rights movements. Emilie Morin reveals a very diferent writer, whose career and work were shaped by a unique exposure to international politics, an unconventional perspective on political action and secretive political engagements. The book will beneit students, researchers and readers who want to think about literary history in diferent ways and are interested in Beckett’s enduring appeal and inluence.

Samuel Beckett, the wordless song and the pitfalls of memorialisation

Many songs unsung, unheard or misheard appear in Becketts oeuvre, from Mr Knotts monotonous and irksome singing in Watt to the ballads with which Miss McGlome greets dusk in Krapps Last Tape. Contrary to such depictions of melody, which function as mere narrative digressions, the fragmentary songs which drift in and out of Becketts post-war novellas crystallise particular anxieties about post-Romantic essentialisations of memory and culture, and gain new currency when considered against the history of European musical nationalisms. This article brings to light Becketts long-standing reflection upon the elevated literary status of the folk song, folklore and translation, and, in so doing, reconfigures Becketts post-war novellas in relation to post-Enlightenment debates about folklore in the contexts of German Romanticism and the Irish Literary Revival.

The Celtic Tiger, its phantoms, and Conor McPherson's haunted rooms

Celtic Tiger economics are portrayed in a distinctive fashion in Irish plays of the 1990s; in the work of Conor McPherson in particular, reminders of the uneven circulation of capital and the hegemony of the free market proliferate, remaining entwined with familiar representations of the supernatural and the unearthly. Drawing on the rich body of work published on the Gothic and occultism, this essay focuses on the metaphorisation of fears related to housing, governance, and private property in McPhersons plays and interrogates their political tenor. I read these texts against recent analyses of neoliberalism and political conservatism and show that the significance of séances, supernatural occurrences, haunted houses, and doppelgängers to McPhersons writing is in itself indicative of the difficulties encountered by the contemporary imagination when apprehending the social transformations concurrent with the rise of neoliberal economies.

W. B. Yeats and Broadcasting, 1924–1965

William Butler Yeats is recognised as a pioneer in the history of radio broadcasting in the United Kingdom; the talks and poetry readings he conceived for the British Broadcasting Corporation between 1931 and 1938 display his genuine interest in writing for, and speaking to the wireless, and the published scripts of his broadcasts have received sustained critical attention in their own right. However, if Yeats’s collaboration with the BBC during the 1930s has been carefully explored, the periods that precede and follow the creation of his BBC broadcasts have remained shrouded in mystery. In this article, I provide a new chronology of radiophonic adaptations and broadcasts of Yeats’s writings that complements extant knowledge of this facet of broadcasting history, and I argue that Yeats’s personal involvement with radio should be envisaged in a wider context. Indeed, the artistic leeway that Yeats was granted when conceiving his BBC programmes is not merely related to his status as Nobel Prize winner, but is inscribed in an evanescent and previously undocumented history of broadcasting, which saw the rise of Yeats’s poetry and plays to prominence on the British and Irish airwaves from the early days of broadcasting in the 1920s.

Beckett’s art of salvage: writing and material imagination, 1932–1987

form, and promoted by the BBC despite the banning of Ulysses (which seems to have had its own benefits). Another was promotion by a British avant-garde circle based in Cambridge including William Empson and Jacob Brownoski. Yet another was the reliable support both personal and professional from T. S. Eliot, who featured Joyce in his journal Criterion from the first number, and who actively and profitably negotiated other publication contracts for Joyce. These different strands come together in a detailed documentation of the recording of Joyce’s recitation of the final pages of Anna Livia Plurabelle by Joyce in a project led by C. K. Ogden. Some of Loukopoulou’s most interesting archival records concern the “Joyce-Ogden-Eliot correspondence” (240) and Joyce’s ready deployment of technology in pursuit of a broader audience. Interesting examples of Joyce references in contemporary crossword puzzles and other popular reference books suggest that the general readership pursuit was more successful than is often acknowledged. Loukopoulou’s argument that London has priority over other urban centres and cultures in Joyce’s work has to contend with Joyce’s own fealty to Dublin and also to the international influence of his work. Her title borrows from “up to maughty London” in Finnegans Wake, but that alludes back to Ireland and to the farewell to London song, “It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary”. Much is made of Joyce’s comments on notice of official publication of Ulysses in London in 1936 that “I have been fighting for this for twenty years ... Now the war between England and me is over, and I am the conqueror” (224). However, he made that comment (two, actually) in Copenhagen, to Norwegian writers. The centrality of London is constantly buffeted by the locality of Ireland and the internationalism of modern literary affairs. Joyce’s actual residence in London (apart from visits) was limited to about six months in 1931 at 28A Campden Grove in Kensington. But the presence of his work in literary London was and remains magnitudes larger. This study wants to replace a conception of Joyce and Joyce work as solitary, aloof, cosmopolitan, “invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails”. It would replace that conception with a materialist one whose success was dependent on and complicit with the power of an imperial capital. Some serious charges and responsibility for the obsolete conception are laid on the post-WWII Joyce industry, its “liberal humanism” (222), and preference for aesthetics over marketplace realities. This is odd because so many of Loukopoulou’s key facts come from the post-WWII wave of Joyce scholars and canonical secondary texts such as Richard Ellmann’s. Nor is it certain that a de-politicised and aestheticised version of Joyce was ever the only approved version. But the new record Loukopoulou establishes of London in the literary production, marketing and consumption of Joyce’s work will certainly be both a basis and an exemplum for new contextual studies. Up to Maughty London adds a new and exciting conceptual hub in what had been seen as a primarily Dublin-Paris axis.

Unspeakable Tragedies: Censorship and the New Political Theatre of the Algerian War of Independence

The word ‘unspeakable’ is ubiquitous in accounts of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). In this context, unspeakability works as shorthand for legal and political issues that are still deeply contested, and are indexed to the use of torture by the French army and the guerrilla war led by the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). The Algerian war had roots in colonial realities and French assimilationist aspirations — more precisely, in the tiered system of civic and voting rights that categorized the majority of Algerians as French subjects, but not French citizens, in Algeria’s distinctive administrative status as a French province, rather than a colony or a protectorate, and in the dedication of the large community of French settlers or pied-noirs to a French Algeria.1 In French public discourse, the word ‘war’, largely banished, was commonly replaced by euphemisms such as the ‘Algerian problem’, ‘counter-insurgency operations’, a ‘law-and-order problem’ or ‘pacification’, in order to avoid giving credence to the idea that a civil war was tearing the nation apart.2 The Evian Accords ending the war in 1962 did not address its obscured status but declared a moratorium on the prosecution of all acts of violence committed during the ‘events’ and opinions voiced about the ‘events’ before the 1961 referendum on Algerian self-determination.3

Introduction: Theatre and the Rise of Human Rights

It may be that, in keeping with global political aspirations, the twenty-first century will become the century of human rights.1 As many voices advocate as oppose such an aspiration, and the worlds of theatre and performance are no exception: the empowering qualities of theatre have been acknowledged by many, especially in relation to vulnerable communities.2 In the wake of the human rights legislation that emerged after World War II and the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, theatre and performance artists have increasingly promoted specific human rights issues in their work and sought to establish special ties with various forms of human rights advocacy.3 The theatre artists who are connected with human rights are myriad, and some of the most celebrated include Augusto Boal (Brazil), renowned for his ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ practices; Ariel Dorfman (Argentina); Athol Fugard and Yael Farber (South Africa); Vaclav Havel (Czech Republic); Harold Pinter (Great Britain); Nawal El Sadaawi (Egypt); Farzaneh Aghaeipour (Iran); Marcie Rendon and Cherrie Moraga (United States); Mangai (India); Nighat Rizvi, Madeeha Gauhar and Shahid Nadeem (Pakistan); and Juliano Mer Khamis, who was murdered in 2011 outside his theatre in the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin, on the West Bank.

Introduction: Theatre and Spectrality

Ghosts are hard to escape in modern and contemporary culture: in film and television dramas, novels, poetry, fine art and installation — and, particularly, we argue in this book, in theatre. Much has been written about ghosts in relation to Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny,’ in which Freud describes feelings of dread and repulsion at a familiar object suddenly rendered full of alienating menace.1 For Jo Collins and John Jervis, Freud’s uncanny suggests ‘a fundamental indecision, an obscurity or uncertainty, at the heart of our ontology, our sense of time, place and history, which is unsettling, potentially terrifying and intriguing.’2 The confrontation with the uncanny has been perceived as a fundamentally modern predicament: Collins and Jervis identify the uncanny as the ‘constitutive aspect of our experience of the modern,’ while Roger Luckhurst describes the uncanny as ‘a meta-concept for modernity itself.’3

Beckett and death

and took aback the less theatrically inclined Fabians, who wondered how you could quietly “permeate” while calling so much attention to one’s annoying self’ (R.F. Dietrich, Foreword, xii). Most potent and entertaining is the penultimate section, ‘Irritate’, which notes Shaw’s deviously audacious attempts to utilise irritation as a front for Fabian propagandism. A host of examples are given from the bothersome unresolved endings of Mrs Warren’s Profession and Major Barbara to his flamboyant articulation of Fabian ideals, ‘Marx is as dead as mutton. I, Bernard Shaw, have killed him’ (79), and his unforgivable address at the Shelley Society by stating he was, in Artist-Fabian terms, ‘like Shelley, a Socialist, Atheist and Vegetarian’ (79). ‘Madness’ and ‘purposeful artifice’ (85) are offered convincingly as motives for Shavian irritation but comic relief as ‘disquisition on Shaw’s brand of Fabian activism’ (85) in Shaw’s self-interviewing resounds as Carpenter’s convincing conclusion. This work is far more liberating in critical terms than the self-styled ‘Educate, Permeate, Irritate’ slogan may suggest and highlights the importance of Fabian political context when consulting Shaw as artist, for it has infected his fiction and non-fiction. It is up to the reader, Carpenter suggests, to be wary of infection. After all, the revolution will not be televised.