Center for the Study of Europe Hosts Talk on Samuel Beckett
The Center for the Study of Europe, an affiliated regional center at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, hosted a recent talk featuring James McNaughton, Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama, on his new book Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath (Oxford University Press, September, 2018).
The conversation, which was co-sponsored with the Institute for the Study of Irish Culture at Boston University, was moderated by Christopher Ricks, William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University.
Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath (Oxford University Press, September, 2018) explores Beckett’s literary responses to the political maelstroms of his formative and middle years: the Irish civil war and the crisis of commitment in 1930s Europe, the rise of fascism and the atrocities of World War II. McNaughton explores a Beckett who monitored propaganda in speeches and newspapers, and whose creative work engages with specific political strategies, rhetoric, and events.
McNaughton also discussed how deep within form, Beckett modeled ominous historical developments as surely as he satirized artistic and philosophical interpretations that overlooked them. According to McNaughton, he burdened aesthetic production with guilt: imagination and language, theater and narrative, all parallel political techniques. Beckett comically embodied conservative religious and political doctrines; he played Irish colonial history against contemporary European horrors; he examined aesthetic complicity in effecting atrocity and covering it up. McNaughton book offers insightful, original, and vivid readings of Beckett’s work up to Three Novels and Endgame.
The mission of the Center for the Study of Europe is to promote understanding of Europe through its cultural heritage; its political, economic, and religious histories; its art, literature, music, and philosophy; as well as through its recent emergence as a new kind of international form through the European Union (EU). Operationally, the center provides a focal point and institutional support for the study of Europe across Boston University through coordination of teaching missions, support of research, community-building among faculty and students, and outreach beyond the University.