Language Data Space Conference in Cyprus: “Linguistic data for the development of language technology and artificial intelligence”
April 3, 2025
International Conference: Make, ReMake, Adapt. Transcultural Perspectives in the European and Francophone Space, May 9-10, 2025
April 15, 2025
The UCY Irish Studies Collective warmly invites you to their inaugural lecture:
Prof. Dirk Van Hulle
(University of Oxford)
The Making of Murphy:
How Samuel Beckett Read, Wrote, Doodled, Revised
Thursday 8 May 2025 @ 15:00
LRC 014 Amphitheatre
Like any other cultural product, books somehow need to be made. Before they can be read, writers need to write them. This lecture focuses on the making of Samuel Beckett’s first published novel Murphy. By looking at the details of the day-to-day writing it tells the story of Beckett’s struggle to develop his poetics. Rather than revering the author as a solitary genius, it shows how writing is also a skill. The genesis turns out to be a fascinating dialectic between literary creativity and writer’s block. Analyzing Beckett’s so-called ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook, the Philosophy Notes, the Psychology Notes, the six notebooks containing the manuscript, and the typescript of Murphy, the lecture explores what Beckett was reading, what his outline and conceptual notes look like, how he wrote the opening sentence, when he came up with the idea for the ending, what he deleted, how much he rewrote, how many writing sessions he needed to complete the novel, and to what extent we can trace moments of either writer’s block or creative downtime.
Dirk Van Hulle is Professor of Bibliography and Modern Book History at the University of Oxford, director of the Oxford Centre for Textual Editing and Theory (OCTET) and of the Centre for Manuscript Genetics at the University of Antwerp. With Mark Nixon, he is director of the MLA award-winning Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org), series editor of the Cambridge UP series ‘Elements in Beckett Studies’, editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies, and curator of the Bodleian exhibition Write Cut Rewrite (Oxford, Feb 2024–Jan 2025). His publications include Textual Awareness (2004), Joyce’s Know-How, Beckett’s Nohow (2008), Modern Manuscripts (2014), Samuel Beckett’s Library (2013, with Mark Nixon), The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (2015), James Joyce’s Work in Progress (2016), Genetic Criticism: Tracing Creativity in Literature (OUP, 2022), and Write Cut Rewrite (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2024, with Mark Nixon).
James Little
Assistant Professor in Drama, Theatre and Performance (he/they)
Department of English Studies
University of Cyprus
