CFP: Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui (SBT/A) Special issue
Please note that the French version of the CFP is available after the English one.
Veuillez noter que la version française de l’appel à contributions est disponible après celle en anglais.
The Samuel Beckett Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR), in collaboration with the refereed bilingual journal, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui (SBT/A), invites abstract submissions for a special issue on
Samuel Beckett and the Tragic.
What does Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre have in common with the definition and conventions of ancient tragedy? How does the definition of tragedy in Aristotelian poetics and ancient theatre apply to Beckett’s overall work and thought, addressing the concerns and impasses of the modern world? Through which poetic and artistic techniques does Beckett transform and modernize the traditional norms of tragedy, reflecting human (self-)destructiveness? With what new means do central concepts of tragedy, such as mimesis, fate, hubris, guilt, punishment, pity, fear, and purification, manifest themselves in Beckett’s texts? In what ways does Beckett’s work offer new interpretations of the tragic for the contemporary world? Has the “death of tragedy” (Steiner, 1980, xii) occurred in modern drama and theatre, and how have re-significations of the tragic evolved from existentialism – a movement which critics have often associated Beckett with – onwards across genres and art forms?
In all of these questions, Beckett’s work offers substantial material for exploring, adopting, and redefining terms such as tragedy, the tragic, and their direct connection with human experience and the profound humanitarian crises of contemporary times. This connection can be seen on multiple levels, including technology, war, environmental destruction, health crises, and pandemics, all of which raise questions about the possibility of human survival in the Anthropocene.
The main feature of ancient tragedy, the tragic hero, can be reconfigured/reimagined in Beckett’s work as a representation of the modern world in decay. As early as the 1930s, Beckett’s ideas about tragedy and expiation (Beckett, 1957, 49), the assimilation of humankind’s living perspective (fate) with death, and the concept of the provisional character of the universe began to emerge (Beckett, 1995, 278), paving the way for a new approach to metaphysics in modern drama (Worth, 2004, 265–6).
The tragedy of the experience of war and nuclear catastrophe, the tragic sense of survival in the ruins of humankind (Beckett, 1995, 278), and the dystopian and ominous image of nature in Beckett’s work find themselves in insistent and incessant dialogue with the precariousness of the modern and contemporary world. Eco-critic Timothy Morton argues that “tragedy […] is at least the initial mode of ecological awareness” (2016, 21); Beckett’s work would seem to affirm this.
After Saint-Lô, after Auschwitz, after Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Beckett does not discard the rubble of tragedy in the theatre pit (as he did with bourgeois comedy in Eleutheria). But his “catastrophe[s] in which the swerve from survival has already taken place” (Salisbury, 2023, 156) use these eroded stones of tragedy as foundation blocks for the new theatrical forms that “accommodate the mess” (Beckett, 1979, 219). As such, Beckett’s microcosms have become “extraordinarily redolent of our damaged planet given the rapidly increasing effects of human intervention upon the earth’s environment” (McMullan, 2021, 1).
While considerable attention has been given in Beckett studies to tragedy, catastrophe and the environmental crisis, discourses that bring those elements in conversation have only begun to emerge. We therefore seek to facilitate those conversations in this themed issue, which welcomes articles on all the genres and artistic forms that Beckett explored and created, as well as those that artists working after him have experimented with, aiming to expand this investigation beyond the theatre. We encourage proposals in English and in French pertaining to (but not limited to) the following topics:
- Redefining the tragic in Beckett’s oeuvre
- Beckett and tragic art forms
- The tragic and intermediality in Beckett’s work
- Beckett and ancient, modern, and contemporary tragedy
- “the sin of having been born” (Beckett, 1957, 49) or Beckett’s “absolute tragedy” (Steiner, 1980, xi)
- Beckett, mimesis, and eco-mimesis
- Beckett and the tragicomic form
- Emergency, crisis, catastrophe, and disaster in Beckett’s drama
- Beckett’s drama and ecologies of crisis
- Performing Beckett in spaces of crisis
- Performing emergency in/with Beckett’s work
- Tragic performances of Beckett’s oeuvre
Abstracts (300 words maximum) and a short bio (100 words maximum) can be sent in English or French to sbwg.iftr@gmail.com (deadline 30 April 2025).
Articles will be submitted by 15 December 2025.
The finished articles should not exceed 6000 words – including abstract, notes, and bibliography.
All articles will be peer-reviewed by the journal as per SBT/A policy.