Call for Papers on the Beckett Letters

July 29, 2009

Beckett’s Letters / Les Lettres de Beckett / Becketts Briefe (Seminar)

41st Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) April 7-11, 2010, Montreal, Quebec - Hilton Bonaventure

Abstract Deadline: September 15

Questions: Carla Taban, carla.taban@utoronto.ca

Early 2009 Cambridge University Press published The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume 1, 1929-1940. Three further volumes containing a selection of letters written between 1940 and 1989 will follow. This extensive yet by no means exhaustive publication of Beckett’s epistolary output has been long awaited since 1985 when the writer gave permission to the editors of his correspondence to publish, after his death, those letters that are relevant to his work.

Authors’ letters are often examined for their biographical and historical import rather than their aesthetic, poetic and textual significance. This research tendency notwithstanding, we propose to explore the relevance of Beckett’s correspondence for his oeuvre and not for his life.

Possible topics include but are not restricted to:

Thematic, structural, narrative, stylistic, textual and/or inter-textual relationships between Beckett’s letters and his work (be it narrative, dramatic, poetic, essayistic or of (self-) translation)
Polyglotism in/of the letters and the work
Letters as textual variants of the work
The Letters of Samuel Beckett as textual research tool: benefits, limits and/or comparison with previously published letters
Letters and other authorial research tools (manuscripts, notebooks, production notebooks, etc.)

Please send 500-word abstracts to Carla Taban, Independent Scholar, carla.taban@utoronto.ca.

Deadline: September 15, 2009

Please include with your abstract: Name and affiliation, Email address, Postal address A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee)

Decisions regarding paper proposals are expected to be made by September 30.