“Voice, Image, Television: Beckett’s Divided Screens”

Abstract

In Voice, Image, Television: Beckett’s Divided Screens Julian Murphet makes the case for a ‘modernist moment’ in 70s television culture, arguing for Samuel Beckett as its great (if somewhat surprising) exemplar. Murphet suggests that the persistence of black and white televisions in British and American living rooms in the 1960s and 1970s at the same time as colour television’s rise to dominance, maps on to a more generally accepted pattern for the relationship between modernism and postmodernism. Through a close of analysis of Beckett’s works for television, Murphet reveals that such pieces as Eh Joe illustrate a televisual modernism that has mostly gone unrecorded by critics. More specifically, in terms of the writer’s creative practice, Murphet examines how through his work for television Beckett methodically investigates the possibilities and limitations of the medium, and in doing so unclogs aesthetic blockages that had beset his own work.