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PREFACE
alma mater, as part of the University’s centenary celebration. Of the forty-two
participants, the essays of twenty-three were published in the volume, written
by scholars from ten countries.
In this new collection, the essays written for the special, off-year conference
in Budapest are in response to the organizers’ Call for Papers that sought
the widest possible range of subject matter and approaches suggested under
the broad title Beckett Influencing / Influencing Beckett: “innumerable
playwrights, novelists, philosophers, artists, composers, performers, film
makers, and critical thinkers whose writings and creative life stimulated and
inspired Beckett and echo through his writing,” as well the ways in which
“Beckett, too, has had a profound impact on his contemporaries and those
who have followed him.” In addition, the title allows essays to focus on two
possible points of entry into Beckett’s works: “back to those whose creative
output, forms, ideas, and subject matter resonate in Beckett’s oeuvre; forward
to those who have found and continue to find inspiration in Beckett’s works,
particularly theatre.” These guidelines are reflected in this volume.
The main goal of the publication, as it is of the Beckett Working Group and
the collections that precede it, is to present and stimulate new ways of looking
at Beckett’s writing so that young researchers and theatre practitioners, as
well as long-established scholars and artists, will be prompted to create their
own studies and performances of his plays. It is our hope that the book will
achieve this end. The IFTR regulations for working groups states: “Groups
exist as long as they are useful, and then may stop meeting when goals are
met or members are tired of their programs.” As this rich and diversified
collection of essays illustrates, Beckett scholars are neither tired nor finished.
Like Beckett and his characters, we go on.
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