Thursday 24 November 2022, 17:00

DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Poupětova 1, Prague 7

The Centre for Irish Studies is pleased to invite you to a presentation by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon that will examine Samuel Beckett’s personal library, which has remained in his apartment in Paris since his death in 1989. It will discuss the reading traces and marginalia found in these books to chart Beckett’s intellectual world. Beckett was fond of ‘reading wildly all over the place’ (as he told his friend Thomas MacGreevy in 1936), collecting material from a wide range of subjects that would influence his aesthetic thinking and his creative works. In particular, the talk will examine the Irish writer’s profound engagement with the visual arts, which played a pivotal role in shaping the striking images that pervade his texts for stage and page. Drawing on his surviving library in Paris, his books on art and gallery catalogues, unpublished diaries, manuscripts and published texts, this talk will give a unique insight into Beckett’s creative, visual imagination.

Dirk Van Hulle is Professor of Bibliography and Modern Book History at the University of Oxford and Director of the Oxford Centre for Textual Editing and Theory (OCTET).

Mark Nixon is Associate Professor of Modern Literature and Co-Director of the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading.

Tickets at WWW.DOX.CZ/EN.

Hosted by DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in collaboration with the Centre for Irish Studies – Charles University Prague.

Supported from the ESP–Irish Studies Programme of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Ireland.