Beckett & Death

With apologies for the extended break, here is a new instalment of Beckett&, on the cheerful subject of Beckett and Death. In this podcast Professor Conor Carville takes Beckett’s often-remarked preoccupation with mortality as an opportunity to think about his prose work, and in particular the slightly marginalised sequence of short pieces Texts for Nothing, written in the early 1950s. Drawing on Reading University’s Beckett archive, he provides a guide to these challenging works, and links them to Beckett’s interest in philosophy as well as to the death of his mother May.

Bibliography

Beckett, Samuel, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Picador, 1979).

Beckett, Samuel, Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, 1950-1976 (London: Faber, 2010).

Beckett, Samuel, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 2013).

Cassirer, Ernst, Kant’s Life and Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).

Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Nixon, Mark, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1937-37 (London: Continuum, 2011).