The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett's Drama

In their sparse and isolated spaces, Samuel Beckett's figures imagine the touch of a lost love or dream of the comfort and care that the hands of a dear one might bring. Applying philosophical writings that feature sensation, particularly touch, this study examines how Beckett's later work for stage and screen dramatizes moments of contact between self and self, self and world, and self and other. With implications for how gender and ethics can be approached within Beckett's aesthetic, this study explores the employment of haptic imagery as an alternative to certain dominant codes of visual representation.

Samuel Beckett, the Gate Theatre Dublin, and the contemporary Irish independent theater sector: fragments of performance history

From 1991, when the Dublin Gate Theatre launched their Samuel Beckett Festival featuring nineteen of Beckett’s stage plays, to more recent years, the Gate dominated Irish productions of Beckett’s theater. The Gate Beckett Festival was remounted in 1996 at the Lincoln Center, New York, and at the Barbican Centre, London, in 1999, and individual or grouped productions have toured regularly since then in Ireland and internationally. However, since the Irish premiere of Waiting of Godot at the Pike Theatre in 1955, in addition to several Beckett plays mounted by the National Theatre, many independent Irish theater companies, such as Focus Theatre, Druid Theatre, and more recently Pan Pan Theatre, Blue Raincoat Theatre, The Corn Exchange, and Company SJ (under director Sarah Jane Scaife), have produced Beckett’s drama. While acknowledging earlier Irish productions, this essay will consider the role of the Dublin Gate Beckett Festival and the Beckett Centenary celebrations in Dublin in 2006 in greatly enhancing the marketability of Beckett’s work, and will discuss the proliferation of productions of Beckett’s stage plays (as opposed to stage adaptations of the prose work, which is a topic for another essay) in the independent theater sector in the Republic of Ireland since 2006. In addition to giving an overview of these recent productions, the essay will consider some issues at stake in creating or constructing performance histories

Samuel Beckett's digital library

A digital reconstruction of Samuel Beckett's personal library, based on the volumes preserved at his apartment in Paris, in archives (Beckett International Foundation) and private collections (James and Elizabeth Knowlson Collection, Anne Atik, Noga Arikha, Terrence Killeen,...).

Vision in click beetles (Coleoptera: Elateridae): pigments and spectral correspondence between visual sensitivity and species bioluminescence emission

Among lampyrids, intraspecific sexual communication is facilitated by spectral correspondence between visual sensitivity and bioluminescence emission from the single lantern in the tail. Could a similar strategy be utilized by the elaterids (click beetles), which have one ventral abdominal and two dorsal prothoracic lanterns? Spectral sensitivity [S(lambda)] and bioluminescence were investigated in four Brazilian click beetle species Fulgeochlizus bruchii, Pyrearinus termitilluminans, Pyrophorus punctatissimus and P. divergens, representing three genera. In addition, in situ microspectrophotometric absorption spectra were obtained for visual and screening pigments in P. punctatissimus and P. divergens species. In all species, the electroretinographic S(lambda) functions showed broad peaks in the green with a shoulder in the near-ultraviolet, suggesting the presence of short- and long-wavelength receptors in the compound eyes. The long-wavelength receptor in Pyrophorus species is mediated by a P540 rhodopsin in conjunction with a species-specific screening pigment. A correspondence was found between green to yellow bioluminescence emissions and its broad S(lambda) maximum in each of the four species. It is hypothesized that in elaterids, bioluminescence of the abdominal lantern is an optical signal for intraspecifc sexual communication, while the signals from the prothoracic lanterns serve to warn predators and may also provide illumination in flight.