Programme

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