This is the first monograph to analyse Beckett's use of the visual arts, music, and broadcasting media through a transdisciplinary approach. It considers how Beckett's complex and varied use of art, music, and media in a selection of his novels, radio plays, teleplays, and later short prose informs his creative process. Investigating specific instances where Beckett's writing adopts musical or visual structures, Lucy Jeffery identifies instances of Beckett's transdisciplinarity and considers how this approach to writing facilitates ways of expressing familiar Beckettian themes of abstraction, ambiguity, longing, and endlessness. With case studies spanning forty years, she evaluates Beckett's stylistic shifts in relation to the cultural context, particularly the technological advancements and artistic movements, during which they were written. With new examples from Beckett's notebooks, critical essays, and letters, Transdisciplinary Beckett evidences how the drastic changes that took place in the visual arts and in musical composition influenced Beckett and, in turn, were influenced by him. Transdisciplinary Beckett situates Beckett as a key figure not just in the literary marketplace but also in the fields of music, art, and broadcasting.
Lucy Jeffery is Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Samuel Beckett Research Centre at the University of Reading. She has published on the work of Beckett, Harold Pinter, Ingeborg Bachmann, Ezra Pound, and Magda Szabó.
Paul Stewart is Professor of Literature at the University of Nicosia. He is the author of two books on Beckett—Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Works (Palgrave, 2011) and Zone of Evaporation: Samuel Beckett’s Disjunctions (Rodopi, 2006)—and the series editor for ‘Samuel Beckett in Company’, published by ibidem Press. He has published widely on Beckett in such journals as The Journal of Beckett Studies and Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui. He is also a creative writer (his novel Now Then was published by Armida in 2014) and a performer in theatre, television, and film.