Guest post by Sabine Meyer Sometimes, someone that has been incredibly important to you, that has penetrated your very way of thinking and being becomes an indispensable thread of your own fabric, sneaking back into your life, again and again, reminding you of the role they play in your never-ending evolution. To me, Lili Ilse… Read More »
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about confinement.
How many steps from my desk to the fridge? (seven) How many from the fridge to the bathroom? (twelve) How many times per day do I track this route?
In October 1954, Samuel Beckett too was thinking of confinement. He was reading a letter from German prisoner Karl-Franz Lembke, who had translated, rehearsed and staged Beckett’s debut play, Waiting for Godot, behind bars. Beckett was clearly moved, as we can see in his response:
Guest post by Arka Chattopadhyay 13th April is Samuel Beckett’s birthday. This date takes me back in time to my undergraduate days. I was an English literature student in Presidency College, Kolkata, India. It was there in 2004 that my obsession with the Nobel Prize winning Irish writer Samuel Beckett began. Yes, let me call… Read More »
Guest post by Dirk Van Hulle and Pim Verhulst Samuel Beckett came into the world on 13 April 1906. Not only was it a Friday the 13th, it was also a Good Friday, the Friday before Easter Sunday, on which the Christian Church commemorates the Crucifixion of Jesus at Calvary. To the superstitiously-minded, any life… Read More »
Indrek Männiste answers a few questions about the new edited collection D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity. How would you describe your book in one sentence? It is a book about the literary legacy of D. H. Lawrence and how he tried – throughout his life and work – cope with the emerging technological age. … Read More »
Arka Chattopadhyay answered a few questions for us about his new book, Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real. How would you describe your book in one sentence? It is a comparatist reading of how mathematical forms operate in the literary texts of Samuel Beckett and how Lacan’s ideas of mathematical forms work… Read More »
Rebecca West was born on December 21, 1892. To celebrate the 126th anniversary of her birth, Laura Cowan explores one of her unfinished and posthumously published works. This recognition of West (née Cicely Isabel Fairfield) closely coincides with the centennial of the World War I Armistice on 11 November 1918, a topic central to West’s unfinished… Read More »
Guest post by Robert Spoo Let’s think about scarcity and law—a theme that I explore throughout Modernism and the Law. Laws seek to produce a kind of scarcity in many areas of human behavior and desire. Criminal libel laws, for example, were enforced to decrease the incidence of reputational attacks and, along with them, the… Read More »
Guest post by Celia Marshik and Allison Pease A polarized environment in which women argue that their experiences are different from men’s, that men oppress them, and that women have a right to claim their own experience. A moment of crisis that threatens men’s world of privilege; men fight back with anger, dismissal, and belligerence that… Read More »
Guest post by Faye Hammill and Mark Hussey Writing Modernism’s Print Cultures gave us an oddly divided perspective on modernism because our research soon made clear that what seems to recent scholars to be cutting edge work on periodicals and advertising, markets and commodities, networks and typography was in fact all invented a hundred years… Read More »