Andrew Kincaid, Co-Director of Celtic Studies, has published a new article on the Irish writer, Samuel Beckett. “Samuel Beckett’s Radio Geographies” appears in the latest edition of the journal Modernist Cultures (Feb. 2022). The essay explores the writer’s decision in the 1950s to change medium, from staging theater to exploring radio.
The essay examines Beckett’s turn to radio against the backdrop of urban theory in Paris, his adopted city. As theorists such as Gaston Bachelard and Henri Lefebvre developed a critique of the of the rationalization of city space, so Beckett turned to the airwaves to put ghostly, fragmented, and anti-authoritarian voices on the air.