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Julie Bates, Beckett's art of salvage: writing and material imagination, 1932-1987, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017, 350pp,
Notes: [Paperback published 2020. This innovative exploration of the recurring use of particular objects in Samuel Beckett's work is the first study of the material imagination of any single modern author. Across five decades of aesthetic and formal experimentation in fiction, drama, poetry and film, Beckett made substantial use of only fourteen objects - well-worn not only where they appear within his works but also in terms of their recurrence throughout his creative corpus. This book offers a striking reappraisal of Beckett's writing, with a focus on the changing functions and impact of this set of objects, and charts, chronologically and across media, the pattern of Beckett's distinctive authorial procedure. The book's identification of the creative praxis that emerges as an 'art of salvage' offers an integrated way of understanding Beckett's writing, opens up new approaches to his work, and offers a fresh assessment of his importance and relevance today. Beckett's Art of Salvage has been very well received in the field, and positively reviewed in a number of publications including Textual Practice, Irish Studies Review, and the Dublin Review of Books. It was published in paperback in 2020. On foot of this publication, I was invited to deliver the keynote lecture at the international conference 'Beckett and the Nonhuman', Free University of Brussels (2019). The monograph also led to an invitation to contribute the chapter 'Materiality / Animality / Humanity' to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Beckett Studies (2022), and an invitation to deliver a keynote lecture at the Samuel Beckett Summer School, TCD, in 2018. On foot of the latter lecture, I was invited to become a Co-Director of the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies.],
Book,
PUBLISHED
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Word & Image, 38, 2, (2022), 1-71p, Julie Bates and Lea Vuong, [Editors and Authors],
Notes: [Co-editor, with Léa Vuong, of "Louise Bourgeois: Through the Archives", a special issue of the journal Word & Image on French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911"2010). In addition to co-editing the issue, I am co-author with Léa Vuong of two articles in the issue: 'At home with the artist: exploring the Louise Bourgeois Archive' (pp. 1-10) and 'Interview with Maggie Wright, Louise Bourgeois Archive, The Easton Foundation' (pp. 11-18). This is a bilingual journal issue, with articles in English and French. It brings together essays by curators and scholars who have spent time in her archive, located next to the artist"s home in New York. The issue regroups contributions by authors who share the same object of study but who are rarely brought into dialogue with each other, ranging from museum and gallery professionals to academics in art history and literary studies. An interdisciplinary and bilingual space for established and new critical voices on Louise Bourgeois, this special issue is a scholarly état présent of the research undertaken at the Louise Bourgeois Archive. It brings to light interactions between word and image, literature and visual art in her work, and the importance of writing and words for Louise Bourgeois. Word & Image has a h-index of 12, overall rank of 25042, an SJR of 0.105, and an impact score of 0.20 (according to: https://www.resurchify.com/impact/details/5800207900 on 10 December 2022)],
Journal,
PUBLISHED
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Julie Bates, "I do, I undo, I redo": Louise Bourgeois and Samuel Beckett, Journal of Beckett Studies, 32, (1), 2023, p1-16 ,
Notes: [I was invited to write this article for the special issue of the journal on "Beckett's female contemporaries". Although Beckett Studies has been established as an international and highly active field of scholarship for many decades, regrettably little attention has been paid to issues of gender and sexuality in Beckett's writing. This special issue is part of a sustained effort by (largely female) scholars within the field to address this gap. Publication of the special issue has been delayed by a number of issues, including COVID. There is great anticipation of this special issue, as there is of a forthcoming book by Daniela Caselli on gender and sexuality in Beckett's work, which is also forthcoming in early 2023. At an international Beckett event at the University of Reading in November 2022, Caselli gave an address in which she named my article in this issue as part of the important and positive shift in Beckett Studies which is underway. Drawing on Bourgeois"s notebooks and diaries in her New York archive, in which Beckett makes fleeting appearances, this article presents a comparative reading of Bourgeois and Beckett, and identifies a significant number of affinities in their creative preoccupations and strategies, points of confluence that call into question assumptions by their respective critics that their creative practice is exceptional. A comparative reading with a female artist has the additional benefit of situating Beckett outside the masculinist heritage in which he has been inscribed, and brings into focus the gender bias that has been evident in both sets of scholarship. The Journal of Beckett Studies has a h-index of 4, overall rank of 21923, an SJR of 0.138, and an impact score of 0.02 (according to: https://www.resurchify.com/impact/details/21100259124 on 10 December 2022)],
Journal Article,
IN_PRESS
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Julie Bates, Erica Van Horn's creative exercises, Irish Studies Review, 31, (1), 2023, p1-29 ,
Notes: [I was invited to write this article for a special issue of the Irish Studies Review, on "Twenty-First Century Irish Women"s Writing and Work", which will be published in February 2023. I am very happy to have a publication on Van Horn coming out soon. This is the first scholarly assessment of her work, and it inscribes her in an Irish Studies context. The article features multiple images of her works. I am hoping that this article raises her profile, and will stimulate interest in my monograph, which I am aiming to have with the publisher in 2024. Van Horn"s work offers a very interesting perspective on contemporary Irish lift because it adopts a deliberately marginal position, and focuses on daily encounters and experiences. Her work often takes as its starting point local customs or linguistic practices that perplex the outsider, creating journal entries, books and ephemera that present a one-sided, coolly recorded, wryly humorous set of observations. This is the first study of the representation of Ireland in Van Horn"s work. The article draws on Claudia Kinmonth"s study of the resourcefulness of the rural Irish material economy. Van Horn"s work shares the "inventive and resourceful" qualities praised by Kinmonth, "making do" with the physical, visual, and verbal raw materials in her immediate environment. Following a comparative reading of Van Horn alongside the writers Claire-Louise Bennett and Alice Lyons, who have both written books in rural Ireland from the perspective of the "blow-in", this article proposes that Van Horn"s work is a form of "local looking" and "attending to what is close at hand", qualities that have been called for by the writer Tim Dee as a means of fostering imaginative engagement with place at this time of climate crisis.],
Journal Article,
PUBLISHED
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Julie Bates, Beckett, Brian O'Doherty and Brian Dillon: intermediality and the future anterior, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, 32, (1), 2020, p129 - 143,
Notes: [This article, in the bilingual journal of Beckett studies, made the case for considering Beckett's writing alongside two contemporary Irish figures: the visual artist Brian O'Doherty, and writer Brian Dillon. The article brings together the two main strands of my research: Beckett and contemporary Irish writing and visual art, and makes the case for the continuing relevance of the questions that preoccupied Beckett, which he sought to address in his work. The article traces the ways in which the intermedial practices of O"Doherty and Dillon cast into relief Samuel Beckett"s own intermediality, marking it as a still-relevant set of propositions for dissolving boundaries between media and posing questions about time. I propose that intermediality functions for O"Doherty as an optimistic means of opening up potential new forms and futures, but for Beckett and Dillon alike designates a negative aesthetic and political dynamic, anticipating failure even in the moment of experimentation. This time-annulling intermediality is evocative, I believe, of what Dillon describes as "a modernist future that never came to pass." ],
Journal Article,
PUBLISHED
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Beckett at the Gate in, editor(s)Nicholas Grene and Christopher Morash , The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp478 - 493, [Julie Bates],
Notes: [The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre provides the most comprehensive survey of the field to be found in a single volume. Drawing on more than 40 contributors from around the world, the book addresses a full range of topics relating to modern Irish theatre from the late nineteenth-century theatre to the most recent works of postdramatic devised theatre. My standing within Beckett Studies and Irish Studies is indicated by the invitation to write this chapter, when I was still an Early Career Scholar. I was invited to write the chapter as a result of a contribution I gave to a seminar in Trinity that drew on my BA research. My BA dissertation had set out the first comprehensive analysis of the Beckett on Film project, which produced film versions of all nineteen of Beckett's stage plays. The Beckett on Film project itself grew out of the Beckett Festival at the Gate, directed by Colgan. This chapter involved research in the Gate archives (before they were catalogued and moved to NUI Galway) and interviews with the director Michael Colgan. It is the first overview of Beckett productions at the Gate theatre, and places Colgan's involvement within the longer and wider context of productions at other Dublin theatres. ],
Book Chapter,
PUBLISHED
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Julie Bates, Writing with air in The Third Policeman, 110 Myles: Flann O'Brien at a Distance, Vienna (online), July 2021, 2021, ,
Notes: [This was an invited keynote lecture],
Conference Paper,
PUBLISHED
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Julie Bates, The political and aesthetic power of the everyday in Beckett's Happy Days, Journal of Beckett Studies, 28, (1), 2019, p52 - 66,
Notes: [This article provides a political and gendered reading of Beckett's play Happy Days, situating it within the context of contemporaneous French cultural theory and military history. The article also sets out a comparative reading of Beckett's play with the contemporaneous novel "The Wall" by the Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer, making a case for thinking about Happy Days in light of the novel by Haushofer, a relatively overlooked but fascinating female writer. Happy Days is contemporaneous with a number of seminal contributions to the concept of the everyday in postwar France. This essay suggests that the increasingly constrained verbal and physical routines performed by its protagonist Winnie constitute a portrait of the everyday, and goes on to trace the affinities between Beckett"s portrait and several formulations of the concept, with particular emphasis on the pronounced gendering of the everyday in many of these theories. The essay suggests the aerial bombings of the Second World War and methods of torture during the Algerian War as potential influences for Beckett"s play, and draws a comparison with Marlen Haushofer"s 1963 novel The Wall, which reimagines the Romantic myth of The Last Man as The Last Woman. It is significant, however, that the cataclysmic event that precedes the events of Happy Days remains unnamed. This lack of specificity, I suggest, is constitutive of the menace of the play, and has ensured that the political as well as aesthetic power of Happy Days has not dated. Indeed, the everyday of its sentinel figure posted in a blighted landscape continues to articulate the fears of audiences, for whom the play may resonate today as a staging of twenty-first century anxiety about environmental crisis. The essay concludes that in Happy Days we encounter an isolated female protagonist who contrives from scant material resources and habitual bodily rhythms a shelter within a hostile environment, who generates, in other words, an everyday despite the shattering of the social and temporal framework that conventionally underpin its formation. Beckett"s play in this way demonstrates the political as well as aesthetic power of the everyday in a time of crisis. The Journal of Beckett Studies has a h-index of 4, overall rank of 21923, an SJR of 0.138, and an impact score of 0.02 (according to: https://www.resurchify.com/impact/details/21100259124 on 10 December 2022)],
Journal Article,
PUBLISHED
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Essayism in contemporary Ireland in, editor(s)Paige Reynolds , The New Irish Studies: Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions, Cambridge , Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp228 - 243, [Julie Bates],
Notes: [I was invited to write a chapter for this prestigious publication in recognition of my standing as an expert in contemporary Irish writing. The book sets out a new assessment of the field of Irish Studies, and proposes new trends to come in the 21st century. My chapter proposes that the fostering of nonfiction by literary magazines including gorse and the Dublin Review has encouraged a number of writers to refine their nonfiction to a sophisticated literary form, something that might be described as "essayism," following Brian Dillon"s 2017 book of the same name. Dillon describes essayism as "A form that would instruct, seduce and mystify in equal measure," and "Not the practice merely of the form, but an attitude to the form " to its spirit of adventure and its unfinished nature " and towards much else." In this chapter, I propose that essayism is an apt form in which to record the cultural expansiveness and orientation beyond Irish history or national boundaries in this particular strand of contemporary Irish writing. Dillon is something of a pioneer of essayism, and this chapter considers his writing in some detail, before reflecting on more recent works by Kevin Breathnach, Nathan O"Donnell, and Niamh Campbell, writers who take the form further than Dillon in certain respects, to include sex and the vulnerable body, humor, mockery and bathos, politics, and anger. The New Irish Studies demonstrates how diverse critical approaches enable a richer understanding of contemporary Irish writing and culture. The early decades of the twenty-first century in Ireland and Northern Ireland have seen an astonishing rate of change, one that reflects the common understanding of the contemporary as a moment of acceleration and flux. This collection tracks how Irish writers have represented the peace and reconciliation process in Northern Ireland, the consequences of the Celtic Tiger economic boom in the Republic, the waning influence of Catholicism, the increased authority of diverse voices, and an altered relationship with Europe. The essays acknowledge the distinctiveness of contemporary Irish literature, reflecting a sense that the local can shed light on the global, even as they reach beyond the limited tropes that have long identified Irish literature. The collection suggests routes forward for Irish Studies, and unsettles presumptions about what constitutes an Irish classic.],
Book Chapter,
PUBLISHED
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Writing with air in The Third Policeman in, editor(s)Paul Fagan, Katherine Ebury, John Greaney , Flann O'Brien and the Nonhuman: Animals, Environments, Machines, Cork, Cork University Press, 2023, pp1-21 , [Julie Bates],
Notes: [I was invited to write this chapter by the editors of the book, who expressed admiration of my approach in my monograph on Beckett, and asked if I could extend this method of analysis to provide a reading of the material imagination in Flann O'Brien's work. My reading drew on Environmental Humanities. The editors were so impressed by the chapter that they invited me to deliver the Keynote Lecture at the International Flann O'Brien conference in Vienna in 2021. Publication of the book has been delayed by COVID. It will be published in early 2023. My chapter examines O"Brien"s experiments with the materiality of air in The Third Policeman. The chapter considers the Irish wartime context of the novel, explores O'Brien's treatment of the substance of air as a potential threat with reference to the scholarship of the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, and assesses the literary potential of foregrounding the medium through which O"Brien"s characters observe their surroundings, that passes through them as they breathe, and the colour of which, in this novel, forecasts the span of their lives at the moment of birth. In doing this, the chapter undertakes a comparative reading of O'Brien's novel and "Parisian Air" one of the first `readymades" created by the French artist Marcel Duchamp in 1919. In this way, the chapter extends O'Brien's work beyond an Irish literary context. This method of widening out the point of reference for Irish Studies into a European frame is something I am very keen to do in my Irish Studies scholarship. ],
Book Chapter,
APPROVED
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