Samuel Beckett and Religion

The Literature and Religion research group presents: Samuel Beckett and Religion, a half-day seminar.

The seminar will open with two presentations of 30 minutes each by Emeritus Professor Chris Ackerley (University of Otago) and Professor Erik Tonning (UiB), followed by discussion:

Professor Chris Ackerley: Unto dust shalt thou return: Samuel Beckett, entropy and end-games.

Professor Erik Tonning: Samuel Beckett and Christianity: Art as Prayer?

This part of the programme will be followed by up to three 10-minutepresentations on the topic of Samuel Beckett and Religion, with Q&A, andresponses from Ackerley and Tonning.

INTERESTED CONTRIBUTORS SHOULD WRITE TO:erik.tonning@uib.no as soon as possible. Contributions are welcome on any level, from students to established academics.

Emeritus Professor Chris Ackerley has recently retired from the Department of English and Linguistics at the University of Otago. His major works on Samuel Beckett are two book-length annotations of Murphy and Watt. He has also edited Watt for Faber (2009) and (with S. E. Gontarski) he co-authored the Grove Press and Faber Companion to Beckett (2005, 2006). More recently he was part of a team editing and annotating three works by Malcolm Lowry, including the 'lost' novel, In Ballast to the White Sea (2014). He is currently working on a study of Samuel Beckett and Science, this being part of a wider project (supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand) called The Machinery of Transcendence, which examined the impact of medieval paradigms upon the Modernist aesthetic. ERIK TONNING is Professor of British Literature and Culture in the University of Bergen, and currently on secondment as Director of the Norwegian Study Centre in the University of York. He is the author of Samuel Beckett's Abstract Drama (2007) and Modernism and Christianity (2014), and joint Senior Editor of two book series from Bloomsbury Academic, Historicizing Modernism and Modernist Archives.