Over the last year or so I’ve been collecting Youtube adaptations of Samuel Beckett’s short plays on my Beckett on Youtube tumblr. I tried to make a foray into addressing some of the issues raised by these adaptations in my article “Transmedia Beckett: Come and Go and the Social Media Archive,” forthcoming in Adaptation. I’m happy to say that the article is now available through advance access on the Oxford Journals site.*

Since writing the article I’ve been thinking more and more about Beckett’s late plays as offering a kind of social media survival kit– reassessing our ideas about memory, storage, repetition and identity in a condition of extreme mediation. (Beckett’s plays themselves resemble elaborate instruction manuals more than traditional theater.) In future entries on this blog I would like to explore in more detail what Beckett has to offer us re: contemporary social media aesthetics.

In the meantime, here is my article abstract:

Beckett’s late works for film, theatre, and television approach the condition of installation pieces, minimalistic and iterative texts that resemble instruction manuals more than theatre. At the same time, these works are preoccupied with archival themes: personal and public memory, history, documents and their technical media. While his works interrogate the condition of archives, Beckett’s own archive is characterized by the increasing visibility in Beckett’s later texts of elaborate instructions, maps, and charts, as in the diagrams that fill the text of Quad. Yet, Beckett’s authorial control over his works became known for its insistence on media specificity, the reluctance to translate a work from one medium to another. Beckett’s “extraliterary” texts (as Gontarski and Chris Ackerly have described them) strive to become their own archive, not as a definitive version recorded in film or technical media, but as sets of instructions to be repeated, and thus capable of producing their own series of iterations. These iterations, in fact, characterize contemporary media archives, as they become organized according to the modular logic of a database over and against the temporal logic of the traditional archive. This essay conceptualizes the archive of Beckett’s works in a transmedia context in which concepts of “work” and “author” no longer function to authorize discrete versions of Beckett’s extraliterary texts.

*This site has a paywall unfortunately, but feel free to contact me for a copy.