Parsons to present at pioneering Beckett archive conference
Entitled Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive, the conference, which aims 'to set a benchmark in Beckett studies and modernist studies', will be taking place at the University of York from 23-26 June 2011. 'Despite the complexity of the still-growing archives, their intellectual force is only beginning to be examined,' say the organisers. 'Is Beckett's work rejuvenated or embalmed by historical treatment, and does his continued importance to theory mark a point of resistance or potential for an historical approach? Is Beckett saved by, or must he be saved from, the archive?'
As well as 20 invited papers, some 200 academics from over 30 countries will also participate. Special guests will include the Nobel-Prize winning author JM Coetzee, the Booker-Prize winning novelist John Banville, and Beckett's former publisher John Calder. John Minihan, whose images of Beckett in Paris and London have become iconic, will introduce an exhibition of his photographs of notable stage productions.
In his paper, Antiquarianism and the Archive in 'Recent Irish Poetry', Parsons will be tackling the question of Beckett's relationship to Irish antiquarianism, suggesting that 'Recent Irish Poetry' - a short but highly influential review written by Beckett in 1934 - presents 'a more nuanced view of the role of antiquarian study and archival memory than we have imagined up to this point'.
'This review may be an early recognition, which returns in Murphy, Malone Dies and elsewhere, of the dialectical nature of archive that we see most clearly expressed in Jacques Derrida's conception of the dual nature of the archive as both destructive and preservative,' writes Parsons. 'By asking the questions above, and thinking more carefully about Beckett's attitude to the antiquarians in this review, I hope to be able to suggest that Beckett's relationship to the project of the recovery of historical memory is more complex than we have previously assumed.'
In the wake of his 2006 centenary, Beckett's work has a continuing resonance in the public sphere, as the recent high-profile publication of the first volume of his letters shows, and the field of Beckett studies remains central to developments in the understanding of modernism. Beckett's oeuvre is also celebrated for its transcendence of specific cultural and historical contexts, a situation that appears to pull against his increasing historical importance.
'Revised or previously unreleased texts, adaptations of unfamiliar works, and the recent publication of his arresting letters have revealed unsuspected reading habits and writing methods, and documented his immersion in specific intellectual and political contexts. This increasingly historical and empirical vision of Beckett seems at odds with the timelessness and universality presumed in earlier accounts of his work,' reads a statement by the organisers.
'Out of the Archive probes the implications of this contradiction by thoroughly reassessing Beckett's oeuvre. It tests his own universalist belief that "the artist who stakes his being is from nowhere," against his equally candid embrace of the specific, the material, "the straws, flotsam, etc., names, dates, births and deaths, because that is all I can know." Doing so now is especially timely when the wider field of modernist studies is increasingly attuned to the quotidian and the ordinary... The daily doings of Winnie, or Didi and Gogo, are not inept responses to cosmic darkness; they are ordinary experience, the subject matter of modernism.'
Parsons is a Lecturer in English Literature at UCT, who earned his PhD in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in 2008, and has published on Irish literature, postcolonial theory and space. He is working on a book manuscript titled Maps to Modernism: Cartography, Space and Modern Irish Literature.