The novelist, short story writer, and dramatist Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 and he remains centrally important to our understanding of twentieth-century literature and its aftermaths.

Beckett appears in several places on our English BA degree. By my count, his work features on at least four modules, and I teach his Fizzle 6 on a second-year critical theory module entitled Humanities After the Human.

This is hardly a surprise, since we have some of the world’s best Beckett scholars at Exeter! Dr John Bolin‘s Beckett and the Modern Novel inserts the writer into the tradition of the modern European novel.

Another of my colleagues Dr Beci Carver researches and teaches Beckett, especially his novel Watt, which features in her book Granular Modernism.

And to end (yet again, as Beckett might say) Beckett is also a major presence in the work of my colleague Professor Laura Salisbury, who wrote her first book on Beckett and humour. She was talking about him on Radio 4 last month and you can listen to what she said here.

I was tempted to call this post something like ‘Beckseter.’ Aren’t you glad I spared you that!