Embedded Files
Monograph: Drawn Towards Listening: Samuel Beckett and the Murmurs of Modernity, 1848-1968. This book reveals Beckett’s singular and enduring place in the secret history of the modes of listening adopted in, and the murmurs produced by, modernist literature and audio-visual culture to encounter the disorientation, dissonance and arrhythmia fundamental to the experience of modernity. An opening chapter examines how, in the wake of the environmental crises, revolutions and famine of 1848, the cultural spectacles and poetic performances of Baudelaire’s Paris, d’Annunzio’s Fiume and Yeats’ Dublin adapted neo-romantic and symbolist modes of listening to imaginary forest murmurs, modes of listening that Beckett’s early works playfully critique in ways that offer a new perspective on 21st century eco-critical modes of ‘deep listening’. Central chapters explore how the encounter with the psychosomatic shocks of war produced an oscillation between psychoanalytic and phenomenological modes of listening to subconscious stutters and creaturely groaning, an oscillation synthesized in the maximalist atmospheres of Céline and Joyce and in the minimalist moods of Beckett’s post-war works. A concluding chapter situates Beckett in relation to the events of May ’68, and to techno-mediatic modes of listening to the buzzing and flickering of spectral frequencies transmitted by radio and television that amplified localised protests to global proportions. It examines how these techno-mediatic modes of listening and spectral frequencies are framed in microcosm by Beckett’s late works in radio, prose and television in ways that continue to resonate in the post-medium age of contemporary installation and performance art. Drawing on contemporary thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Peter Sloterdijk, the book theorizes listening as a paradigmatic mode of aesthetic perception that moves between the audio-visual and textual registers, as well as an affective disposition and an ethical position involving the state of being beside oneself and between selves and worlds. Listening thus offers a new, transnational approach to Beckett’s work across prose, theatre, radio, film and television, one that bridges the critical boundaries between the Irish and French, modern and post-modern Becketts, and opens a new space of resonance between the disciplines of comparative literature, sound studies, performance studies and visual culture.
Monograph: Irish laughter, French Infections, German Doctors. This book explores what might be called pre and post-modernisms of jubilation via the laughter produced by Irish writers from Swift and Sterne, through Wilde, Yeats and Synge, to Joyce and Beckett and contemporary Irish poetry. It treats laughter not as a side-effect of humour or comedy, or as a psychic defence mechanism or compensation against cultural or political repression, but as a minimally embodied 'event' (or infection) that is strategically incubated and transmitted by Irish writers in order to produce productive mutations in the host body (language, culture, thought). It traces the ways these infections of Irish laughter have been picked up by French writers and thinkers in order to provoke mutations in literary, cultural and philosophical systems of representation -- from Baudelaire and Balzac, to Breton, Bataille, Lyotard, Derrida and Cixous. Despite the literary and critical force of these Irish-French symbioses, it argues that the incredible power and pleasure of Irish laughter is better understood by the diagnoses of German 'doctors' such as Nietzsche, Helmuth Plessner and Peter Sloterdijk who, despite apparent immunity to the Irish infection of laughter, have treated laughter as symptomatic of the eccentric, expansive subjectivity of the mentally alert body.
Research and Public Engagement: Performing the Past
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