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In Our Time: Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Samuel Beckett

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the playwright and novelist, author of Waiting for Godot

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of the author of Waiting for Godot, who lived in Paris and wrote in French as he found that more difficult than writing in English

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Samuel Beckett (1906 - 1989), who lived in Paris and wrote his plays and novels in French, not because his French was better than his English, but because it was worse.  In works such as Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Molloy and Malone Dies, he wanted to show the limitations of language, what words could not do, together with the absurdity and humour of the human condition.  In part he was reacting to the verbal omnipotence of James Joyce, with whom he’d worked in Paris, and in part to his experience in the French Resistance during World War 2, when he used code, writing not to reveal meaning but to conceal it.

With

Steven Connor
Professor of English at the University of Cambridge

Laura Salisbury
Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Exeter

And 

Mark Nixon
Associate Professor in Modern Literature at the University of Reading and co-director of the Beckett International Foundation

Producer: Simon Tillotson

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