CLIC is pleased to announce the publication of the special issue 'Beckett and Contemporary Aesthetic Form’ for the Journal of Beckett Studies (vol. 34, issue 1, April 2025, Edinburgh University Press), edited by CLIC member Pim Verhulst and Conor Carville (University of Reading). The issue also features a contribution by Pim Verhulst titled Film, Vidéo, High Definition: Beckett Re-visioned through Rogosin, Lipman, Douglas and Friedkin.
Summary
This special issue is devoted to the prominent position that Samuel Beckett continues to hold in contemporary cultural production. It follows a dialectical logic that charts influence in two directions: from the past to the present and the present to the past. The various contributions to the dossier explore this creative dynamic, in addition to some of the new aesthetic forms that Beckett experimented with in the 1960s-1980s, as appears from his intertextual interests and involvements in third-party adaptations of his work, but also from his unpublished drafts. Essays cover a wide variety of case studies, ranging from prose fiction, performance, video, cinema and the visual arts to technologies or formats such as 3D scanning and high definition. Not limited to the purely aesthetic, additional topics include race, gender and politics, illustrating how Beckett’s oeuvre is constantly re-historicized and has not lost its relevance for the present moment.