Data Entry: Please note that the research database will be replaced by UNIverse by the end of October 2023. Please enter your data into the system https://universe-intern.unibas.ch. Thanks

Login for users with Unibas email account...

Login for registered users without Unibas email account...

 
Beckett's Media System: A Comparative Study in Multimediality
Third-party funded project
Project title Beckett's Media System: A Comparative Study in Multimediality
Principal Investigator(s) Schweighauser, Philipp
Project Members Rapcsak, Balazs
Organisation / Research unit Departement Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften / Amerikanistik (Schweighauser)
Project Website https://beckett-media.philhist.unibas.ch/en/
Project start 01.11.2015
Probable end 31.07.2019
Status Completed
Abstract

“Beckett’s Media System: A Comparative Study in Multimediality” is a 3-year project that aims to explore and describe the dynamics of Beckett’s media system. Technology shapes Beckett’s output in crucial ways on three levels: it plays a pivotal role in the production of his work, appears prominently on the diegetic plane of his plays, and shapes the textual and medial organization of his texts and productions. Yet it has only recently been recognized that Beckett is a pre-eminent multimedia artist whose innovations influence media art to the present day. The excitement of this recognition is coupled with a challenge posed by the realization that much of the technology, which the aesthetics of Beckett’s media works depend on, belongs to the past. Since the reflection on the effects of media technologies on culturally established norms of representation define Beckett’s work in fundamental ways, this historical distance creates the need for technologically informed re-readings of a representative cross-section of Beckett’s work in several media. At the same time, the significance of the project can be understood in broader terms. For Beckett is a privileged observer of a medial transition whose subtle artistic negotiations of newly emerging systems of cultural exchange, which also define our present, offer unique insights into how the epistemological and anthropological parameters of culture change. Our project applies a comprehensive multimedial perspective to Beckett’s work, combining media archaeology with close reading, transformational analysis, and media- and genre-historical contextualization. Our main analytical focus is on Beckett’s creative combination of varying medial configurations and communication paradigms, including writing, electromagnetic sound recording, radio transmission, cinematography, and audiovisual broadcasting. In staging these combinations, Beckett reflects upon and enacts the radical impact that medial and technological developments had on basic human activities such as reading, speaking, listening, seeing, and remembering. In Beckett’s plays, dismembered organs (Mouth), disembodied human faculties (Voice), media fields (Music, Word), and apparatuses (Tape) are dramatic characters that attain a status equal to human beings. Beckett not only thematizes technology and uses it in the production of his work; he also abuses apparatuses in the sense that he disrupts their functioning by staging processes of interference (remediation, mimicry, hybridization) between them to expose how they shape perception and cognition. In the framework of our project, we analyze a range of materials available in The Samuel Beckett Collection of the University of Reading Library, some of which have not been discussed by scholars, while this body of material has not been researched from a sustained media-theoretical perspective yet. Much of the project's innovative thrust stems from its sustained effort to bring together some of the most powerful voices in contemporary anglophone Beckett scholarship and German media analysis (especially media archaeology but also Luhmannian systems theory and historical epistemology) to think anew the interplay between media, materiality, aisthesis, and the discursive processes in Beckett’s work. Our ultimate aim is to rethink Beckett’s oeuvre as a complex, dynamic media system.

Keywords literary studies, screen works, media archaeology, Samuel Beckett, multimediality, stage plays, materiality, radio plays, mediality
Financed by Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)

Published results ()

  ID Autor(en) Titel ISSN / ISBN Erschienen in Art der Publikation
4484920  Schweighauser, Philipp  'Gut': Becketts Verhandlungen von Macht in seinen Fernsehspielen für den Süddeutschen Rundfunk  978-3-7705-6149-0  Literatur und Politische Philosophie: Subjektivität, Fremdheit, Demokratie  Publication: Book Item (Buchkap., Lexikonartikel, jur. Kommentierung, Beiträge in Sammelbänden etc.) 
4601856  Rapcsak, Balazs  Beckett the Spiritist: Breath and its Media Drama    Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui  Publication: JournalArticle (Originalarbeit in einer wissenschaftlichen Zeitschrift) 
4153214  Rapcsák, Balázs  Switching Attention: Technologies of Awareness in Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape  978-2-343-10002-9 ; 978-2-140-02805-2    Publication: ConferencePaper (Artikel, die in Tagungsbänden erschienen sind) 
4610127  Rapcsak, Balazs; Nixon, Mark; Schweighauser, Philipp  Beckett and Media  9781526145833    Publication: Edited Book (Herausgeber eines eigenständigen Buches) 
4610129  Schweighauser, Philipp  Angles of Immunity: Beckett's Film  978-1-5261-4583-3 ; 978-1-5261-4582-6  Beckett and Media  Publication: Book Item (Buchkap., Lexikonartikel, jur. Kommentierung, Beiträge in Sammelbänden etc.) 
   

MCSS v5.8 PRO. 0.429 sec, queries - 0.000 sec ©Universität Basel  |  Impressum   |    
28/03/2024