IASIL 2005 Charles University, Prague
Ireland – A Global Village?
25-28 July 2005

Beckett and Sexuality

“What would one do without women? Explore other channels.”
(Mercier and Camier)

Papers in the panels below aim to explore other channels with regards the vexed issue of sexuality in Beckett Studies. This is a severely neglected aspect of Beckett’s work and participants will examine sexuality conceived in the broadest sense. There are many channels to be explored. Despite the avowedly homosocial, often homosexual, content of many Beckett texts, for example, there has been little sustained initiative to examine its critical significance. Also, the propensity for sexual perversion and dysfunction in Beckett’s texts has not been sufficiently treated, and issues like impotence, coprophilia and coprophagy have been neglected in Beckett scholarship.

Two panels on the theme of Beckett and Sexuality organised by Dr Seán Kennedy (NUI Galway) have been accepted.

(1) Esse est Percipi: Beckett and Voyeurism

Chair: Seán Kennedy (NUI Galway)

Panellists:
Liz Barry (Warwick University)
Voyeurism and the Ethics of Narrative Realism in Beckett's Prose Fiction

Paul Stewart (Nicosia)
"Then everything went kaputt." Belacqua's Sexuality in Dream of Fair to Middling Women

S.E. Gontarski (Florida State University)
Voyeurism: Beckett and the Scopic Drive

(2) Beckett and Sexuality

Chair: TBC

Panellists:
Patrick Bixby (Arizona State University)
How to Become Minor: Beckett and the Casement Diaries

Antonio Garcia (Houston)
Beckett's Shit-Starter: The Narrator and Coprophilic Drive in "First Love"

Sean Kennedy (NUI, Galway)
"Explore other channels": Beckett, Homosexuality and the Politics of Fertility “What would one do without women? Explore other channels.” (Mercier and Camier)