We can't wait to meet you

International Conference

October 16-18, 2020

Batesville, Arkansas

"Nature has forgotten us" says Hamm in Beckett's Endgame. This simple yet catastrophic statement speaks to why Beckett Studies are more and more concerned to what Beckett's oeuvre can tell us about our contemporary and urgent plights with regard to nature and the environment. Taking a cue from these contemporary developments in Beckett scholarship, as well as from recent literary and cultural studies on post-humanism, the Anthropocene, eco-criticism, object-oriented and materialist ontologies, the "Samuel Beckett and Nature" International Conference will assemble scholars interested in the different questions of nature, the environment and all its concomitant catastrophes in and around Beckett's works. It will close with a performance of Molloy by Gare St. Lazare Ireland within the show cave in Blanchard Springs Caverns.

Photo used with permission from Dave Thomas.

Jean-Michel Rabaté

University of Pennsylvania

“Echo’s Bones and Ecoflesh: Nature in Beckett’s poems”

H. Peter Steeves

DePaul University

“What dreams! Those forests!: Memory and Nature in Beckett, from Clov’s Flea to Krapp’s Last Banana”

Possible topics for the papers or panels are:

• Bio- and Zoo-politics in Beckett
• Beckett and the Anthropocene
• Beckett and the post-human
• Beckett and Animal or Plant Studies
• Eco-Beckett, Eco-criticism, and Eco-deconstruction
• Beckett and Materialist or Object Oriented Ontologies
• Notions of Nature or the Natural in Beckett

Deadline for papers or proposed panels submission, in both English and French: January 20, 2020. Send them to beckettandnature@gmail.com

Photo used with permission from Marek Kedzierski