Lucy Jeffery 
Transdisciplinary Beckett 
Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process

This is the first monograph to analyse Beckett’s use of the visual arts, music, and broadcasting media through a transdisciplinary approach. It considers how Beckett’s complex and varied use of art, music, and media in a selection of his novels, radio plays, teleplays, and later short prose informs his creative process.

Investigating specific instances where Beckett’s writing adopts musical or visual structures, Lucy Jeffery identifies instances of Beckett’s transdisciplinarity and considers how this approach to writing facilitates ways of expressing familiar Beckettian themes of abstraction, ambiguity, longing, and endlessness. With case studies spanning forty years, she evaluates Beckett’s stylistic shifts in relation to the cultural context, particularly the technological advancements and artistic movements, during which they were written.

With new examples from Beckett’s notebooks, critical essays, and letters, Transdisciplinary Beckett evidences how the drastic changes that took place in the visual arts and in musical composition influenced Beckett and, in turn, were influenced by him. Transdisciplinary Beckett situates Beckett as a key figure not just in the literary marketplace but also in the fields of music, art, and broadcasting.

Over de auteur

Lucy Jeffery is Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Samuel Beckett Research Centre at the University of Reading. She has published on the work of Beckett, Harold Pinter, Ingeborg Bachmann, Ezra Pound, and Magda Szabó. She contributed the ‘Beckett and Visual Arts’ chapter to The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Beckett and a chapter on Beckett’s radio drama to Samuel Beckett and Technology. Her articles have also appeared in the Journal of Beckett Studies, Word and Image, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, The Harold Pinter Review, etc. Her research interests extend to contemporary performance studies and 20th century Hungarian literature.