MY NEW UPCOMING COURSES ON ETHICS, CLOSE READING AND BECKETT

This spring and summer I will be teaching three new courses, available to everyone and delivered online.

The first two are starting in April and are being run through a brand-new venture: Keystone Inspires.

I’ll be teaching How to Live: An Introduction to Ethics. This eight-week course looks at four very different approaches to ethics: the character-based ethics of Aristotle, the moral phenomenology of the Buddha, the duty-based ethic of Immanuel Kant, and the consequent-based ethics of the Utilitarians. We will then look at challenges to morality and moral truth from Nietzsche in the nineteenth century and the rise of logical positivism in the early twentieth century.

I’m also teaching The Art of Reading Closely. This is another eight-week course focused on learning how to get more out of reading literature by close reading: paying attention to the choices that a writer makes on the page and how they affect us as readers. This practice is hugely rewarding not just in terms of what it unlocks in the text but also what it tells us about the process of reading and about ourselves as reader.

Finally, I’ll be teaching a course on The Plays of Samuel Beckett, running in July 2021 through the Insitute of Continuing Education at the University of Cambridge. Booking for this is not yet open.

All three courses are very close to my heart and have run in different iterations in previous years. I am delighted to be able to bring them to a wider audience.

Find out more on the courses page.

The wisdom of surrender

Samuel Beckett turned an obscure 17th-century Christian heresy into an artistic vision and an unusual personal philosophy.

Samuel Beckett’s writing often seems to have a religious air about it. Take his most famous play, Waiting for Godot (1953). Two Chaplinesque tramps – Vladimir and Estragon – wait at a crossroads by a tree for someone who might provide an answer to their prayers: Mr Godot. This is a man who has a suspiciously divine white beard, who ‘does nothing’, and who remains frustratingly absent, despite repeated promises of his imminent arrival.

Cambridge summer courses: cancelled due to COVID-19

Updated 28 April 2020: The courses advertised below have, sadly, been cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Institute of Continuing Education at the University of Cambridge has cancelled its International Summer Programmes. Plans are currently in place to create a “Virtual Summer Festival of Learning” to stand-in for the cancelled summer programme. More information is available here.

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I’ll be teaching two courses this year at the University of Cambridge as part of the Institute of Continuing Education’s International Summer Programmes.

Last year’s course on Irish comic fiction is now a fully-fledged Beckett course: we’ll be reading Murphy and Watt - two of Beckett’s funniest novels - and examining their debts to Irish and Anglo-Irish comic authors such as Sterne, Joyce, and Swift.

I’m also delighted to be running a brand-new course on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. This great saga of revenge, friendship, and philosophical exploration in the whaling fisheries of the south seas is one of my very favourite books. It’s a life-changing read that will more than repay the attention afforded by a week-long course.

More information is available on my courses page and my university page.

NEW BOOK: Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction

Palgrave have recently released a new book of essays, Experiments in Life-Writing, edited by Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak. The book is the product of a fantastic conference that Lucia and Julia organised at Goldsmiths back in 2015 on the intersection of fiction with auto-biographical and biographical writing.

I have a chapter in the book on B.S. Johnson, particularly looking at the influence of Samuel Beckett's prose on his 1966 'non-fiction novel' Trawl.  I argue that although Trawl frequently adopts the syntax, tone, and humour of Beckett’s prose—particularly the “trilogy” of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable—it ultimately moves beyond imitation to experimentation. Johnson pushes Beckettian style to breaking point by demonstrating how its trademark cynicism and despair are unsuitable for narrating personal memories, particularly Johnson’s traumatic childhood experience as a wartime evacuee. Johnson chooses autobiography, I argue, to extract the experimental novel from the ‘cul-de-sac' he felt Beckett had reached after How It Is (1964).

NEW BOOK: Time and Temporality in Literary Modernism

Peeters Publishers have just released Time and Temporality, a new collection of essays on the treatment of time in literary modernism, edited by MDRN, a research lab at the University of Leuven. The book features a chapter from me on Samuel Beckett's use of 'ecological' time in his work. My essay asks whether, given the frequent use of ecological time as an ethical thought experiment in writing associated with the environmental movement, whether Beckett's not-infrequent appeals to evolutionary and geological history offers anything resembling a green ethic. The talk on which my chapter is based can be viewed here:

The book has many other valuable essays, on André Gide, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Henri Bergson, Flann O'Brien, Charles Olson, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and much more besides.