Beckett and the Brain

Beckett and the Brain

Like much modernist writing, Beckett's work has often been read as an
experiment in consciousness. Explorations of the shape of the relationship
between subjectivity, language and the body remain a mainstay of much Beckett
criticism, while the more popular cultural sense of Beckett is still resolutely
convinced of the work's probing of the human condition. More recently, archival
support for Beckett's knowledge and use of neurological, psychological and
psychoanalytic material, allied with an increasingly dominant cultural sense of
the mind as a complex epiphenomenon of an evolved neurological substrate,
has produced critical studies exploring the suggestive resemblances between
Beckett's textual experiments and those neurological, neuropsychological and
psychiatric disorders that illuminate the modes of functioning of the human
brain. What has been less fully explored, however, are the methodological
implications of reading Beckett's work alongside historical and contemporary
neurology and psychology. What are the critical and ethical problems inherent in
relying on a mode of 'resemblance' between Beckett's work and brain science?
What new kinds of critical practice might be forged between disciplines? Might
Beckett's work might have clinical as well as critical uses?

The London Beckett Seminar is hosting a morning of 'position papers' and
discussion on the topic of 'Beckett and the Brain' to explore some of these
questions. Speakers include:

Liz Barry (Warwick)
Peter Fifield (Oxford)
Jonny Heron (Warwick)
Ulrike Maude (Durham)
Adam Piette (Sheffield)
Laura Salisbury (Birkbeck)

Room 203, Birkbeck, Clore Management Centre, Torrington Square.

10.30-1pm, 24 June 2010.

All welcome.

Dr Laura Salisbury
School of English and Humanities
Birkbeck College
0207 0790693

Organised by the London Beckett Seminar