Olga Beloborodova

• Doctor of Philosophy
• postdoc at University of Antwerp

Literary drafts are a constant in literatures of all ages and linguistic areas, and yet their role in writing processes in various traditions has seldom been the subject of systematic comparative scrutiny. In 38 chapters written by leading experts in many different fields, this book charts a comparative history of the literary draft in Europe and b...

Literary drafts are a constant in literatures of all ages and linguistic areas, and yet their role in writing processes in various traditions has seldom been the subject of systematic comparative scrutiny. In 38 chapters written by leading experts in many different fields, this book charts a comparative history of the literary draft in Europe and b...

Providing a broad, definitive account of how the ‘archival turn’ in humanities scholarship has shaped modernist studies, this book also functions as an ongoing ‘practitioner's toolkit’ (including useful bibliographical resources) and a guide to avenues for future work. Archival work in modernist studies has revolutionised the discipline in the past...

The present essay argues that Beckett's concept of ‘formal integrity’, which he first articulated in his discussion of Film with the production team in 1964, was in fact shaped long before Film was on Beckett's writing desk. Rather, it emerged gradually during the early genesis of Play, the work that has often been associated with Film as the two w...

This chapter aims to demonstrate the dynamics between Beckett’s original texts and their translations in terms of their mutual influence. Secondly, it illustrates the tension that Beckett experienced as a bilingual author, namely the tension between his ostensible pursuit of abstraction and ‘vaguening’ (Pountney 1988), and the inherently explanator...

Samuel Beckett and Translation explores the idea that at the core of Beckett’s work there is no fixed centre but a constant movement between variants of French and English. This collection of newly commissioned edited essays opens up original lines of enquiry into this restless impulse and how it finds a resonance in Beckett’s writing. The book, in...

Beckett’s short play Play and his only film Film are both named after their medium and were composed at the same time. By bringing these two works together, this chapter attempts to sketch Beckett’s emerging multimedial authorship that began to take shape in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The chapter argues that Beckett’s multimedial authorship wa...

This collection of essays is the first comprehensive discussion of the role technology plays in shaping Beckett’s trademark aesthetics. Samuel Beckett and Technology assembles an innovative and diverse range of scholarly approaches to the topic, which collectively renegotiate our understanding of his work in prose, theatre, film, radio and televisi...

When literary authors translate their own work, they sometimes collaborate with other writer-translators. While such “collaboration” is often acknowledged on the title pages of the resulting publications, the nature of each joint venture is typically very different in practice. Surviving archival traces often allow for a more detailed reconstructio...

A stark departure from traditional philology, What is Authorial Philology? is the first comprehensive treatment of authorial philology as a discipline in its own right. It provides readers with an excellent introduction to the theory and practice of editing ‘authorial texts’ alongside an exploration of authorial philology in its cultural and concep...

The aim of this Element is to offer a reassessment of Beckett's alleged Cartesianism using the theoretical framework of extended cognition – a cluster of present-day philosophical theories that question the mind's brain-bound nature and see cognition primarily as a process of interaction between the human brain and the environment it operates in. T...

Despite Beckett’s claim of having a “bee in [his] bonnet” about “mixing media,” intermediality and transmedial adaptation were important sources of innovation for his writing, especially from the 1950s onwards. The present article analyses Play (1964) as a good example of this dynamic by demonstrating (1) how its genesis was influenced by Beckett’s...

Play is usually regarded as the starting point of Beckett's late theatre, introducing a radically new approach to the body and language that set a benchmark for subsequent plays such as Not I, That Time and Footfalls. Building on Krapp's Last Tape and Happy Days, Play dehumanizes its characters by means of the audiovisual technologies that Beckett...

The archival turn in Beckett studies has revealed a wealth of material that, despite being discarded or reworked, remains a valuable source of information on Beckett's modus operandi as a writer. This article examines the genesis of Play from the postcognitive angle of extended cognition, and demonstrates how the author's mind, contrary to the gene...

This chapter argues that the radio medium had an important influence on the development of Beckett’s ‘postcognitivist modernism’. While his first radio play, All That Fall, was still quite conventional in the way it resorts to dramatic techniques and depicts fictional minds as an interaction between inside and outside, Embers set off on a radical c...

This book of collected essays approaches Beckett’s work through the context of modernism, while situating it in the literary tradition at large. It builds on current debates aiming to redefine ‘modernism’ in connection to concepts such as ‘late modernism’ or ‘postmodernism’. Instead of definitively re-categorizing Beckett under any of these labels,...

This paper presents an on-going PhD project that is part of the effort to reassess the alleged “inward turn” (Kahler, 1973) in modernist literature and place modernist fictional minds within their fictional environments. Borrowed from the domain of cognitive science, the principle of “active externalism” in general and the Extended Mind Theory in p...