Thursday, 13 September
9:00 – 9:30 Registration and coffee
9:30 – 10:00 Conference opening
Opening address by Edward Beckett
10:00 – 11:15 Keynote lecture (Chair: Shane Weller)
Laura Salisbury (University of Exeter, UK) – Beckett’s Technologies of Waiting
11:15 – 11:30 Coffee break
11:30 – 12:45 Panel 1: Human/Machine (Chair: Ondřej Pilný)
Jonathan McAllister (University of Nottingham, UK) – The Psychotechnographic Genesis of Krapp’s Last Tape
Celine Thobois (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland) – Beckett and La Mettrie: From Man a Machine to a Techno-Human Being
Ken Alba (Boston University, USA) – Cybernetic Krapp: Mediated and Extended Cognition in Krapp’s Last Tape
12:45 – 14:15 Lunch break
14:15 – 15:30 Panel 2: Radio Echoes (Chair: Galina Kiryushina)
Pim Verhulst (University of Antwerp, Belgium) – Beckett’s Technography: Traces of Radio in the Late Prose
Lucy Jeffery (University of Reading, UK) – Words and Music “or some other trouble”
15:30 – 16:00 Coffee break
16:00 – 17:15 Panel 3: En/Decoding Beckett (Chair: Pim Verhulst)
Dirk Van Hulle (University of Antwerp, Belgium) – Digital Poetics and Digital Hermeneutics in Beckett Studies
Hunter Dukes (University of Cambridge, UK) – Coetzee’s Beckett & the Technology of Rhythm
Annette Balaam (University of Bristol, UK) – Living in the Moment: The Process of ‘Continuous Incompletion’ in a Virtual Post Beckett/Beckett
19:00 – Welcome reception hosted by H.E. Charles Sheehan, Ambassador of Ireland to the Czech Republic
Concert: IMAGINATION DEAD IMAGINE (European premiere) – music composed by Michael Roth, performed by Quartet Nouveau (USA)
Friday, 14 September
9:00 – 9:30 Registration and coffee
9:30 – 10:45 Panel 4: Theories of Technology (Chair: Robert Reginio)
Louis Armand (Charles University, Czech Republic) – The Unnamable Object Of Semiocapitalist Desire
Michael D’Arcy (St. Francis Xavier University, Canada) – Slack Modernism
Douglas Atkinson (Vrije Universiteit, Belgium) – Dead at Last: Beckett, Derrida, and the Technology of Thanatographia
10:45-11:00 Coffee break
11:00-12:15 Panel 5: Sociopolitical Technologies (Chair: Mark Nixon)
Feargal Whelan (UCD Humanities Institute, Ireland) – The Permanent Way: Movement and Stasis in Beckett’s Railways
Yoshiki Tajiri (University of Tokyo, Japan) – Endgame and the Everyday Life of the Nuclear Age
Einat Adar (Charles University, Czech Republic) – Surveillance and Resistance: Beckett in the Cyber Age
12:15-13:45 Lunch break
13:45-15:00 Panel 6: Correspondences (Chair: Lucy Jeffery)
Minako Okamuro (Waseda University, Japan) – Subjective Camera Eyes in Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Beckett’s Film
Robert Reginio (Alfred University, USA) – Obsolete Technology: Beckett and Hollis Frampton
15:00-15:15 Coffee break
15:15-16:30 Panel 7: Cinematic and Televisual Influences (Chair: Balazs Rapczak)
Galina Kiryushina (Charles University, Czech Republic) – A Well-Received Disaster: Michel Mitrani’s Tous ceux qui tombent
Olga Beloborodova (University of Antwerp, Belgium) – The Effect of (Cinematic) Technology on the Geneses of Play and Film
Jean Antoine-Dunne (The University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago) – ‘Ciné-metaphorism’ and Beckett’s Use of Distortion
16:30-16:45 Coffee break
16:45-18:00 Keynote lecture (Chair: Anna McMullan)
Sarah Kenderdine (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland) – Making Unmakeablelove
20:00- Special screening and discussion (Chair: Feargal Whelan) – Ponrepo Cinema
Nicholas Johnson (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland) – From the Digital to the Virtual: Beckett Experiments 2007–17
Saturday, 15 September
9:00 – 9:30 Registration and coffee
9:30 – 10:45 Panel 8: Posthumanism, Autopoiesis, Techno-Aesthetics (Chair: Dúnlaith Bird)
Thomas Gurke (The University of Koblenz and Landau, Germany) – Beckett’s “Ping” ‘in-between’ Precognition and the Posthuman
Christina Diamant (Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania) – Machinic Autopoiesis and Contamination in
The Unnamable and Not I
Balazs Rapcsak (University of Basel, Switzerland) – On Beckett’s Techno-Aesthetics
10:45-11:00 Coffee break
11:00-12:15 Panel 9: Performing Technology (Chair: Clare Wallace)
Naoya Mori (Kobe Women’s University, Japan) – Beyond the Technology: Decomposing the “Dramatized Taboo” of Beckett’s Quad
Anna McMullan (University of Reading, UK) – Archeologies of the Voice: Radio, Technology and the More-Than-Human in Beckett’s All That Fall and Embers
Dúnlaith Bird (University of Paris 13, France) – “…the mechanics of which I am unfamiliar”: The Strangeness of Technology in Beckett
12:15-13:45 Lunch break
13:45-14:15 Interlude
Szymon Uliasz, Tomasz Wisniewski (University of Gdańsk, Poland) – …but the clouds…: On S.E. Gontarski’s Laboratory Work in Sopot/Gdańsk
14:15-14:25 Coffee break
14:25-15:15 Panel 10: Technē (Chair: Einat Adar)
Thomas Thoelen (Vrije Universiteit, Belgium) – “Like a kindling fire, a dying fire”: The ‘Techno-Logic’ of Invention in The Unnamable
Shane Weller (University of Kent, UK) – The Unmaking of Homo Faber: Beckett and the Exhaustion of Technē
15:15-15:45 Coffee break
15:45-17:00 Keynote lecture (Chair: Dirk Van Hulle)
Jonathan Bignell (University of Reading, UK) – Beckett and TV: Innovation and Anachronism
17:00-17:30 Concluding remarks
19:30- Conference dinner