Literary Essays: Dickens, Beckett and Others

Beckett

Beckett's Low Church. A lecture given at the English Institute symposium Beyond Belief, Harvard University, 28 September 2007.

Beckett and the World. A lecture given at the Global Beckett conference, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, 26 October 2006. [pdf version]

'On Such and Such a Day...In Such a World': Beckett's Radical Finitude. A lecture given at Borderless Beckett, An International Centenary Symposium, Tokyo, 1st October 2006. [pdf version]

'My Fortieth Year Had Come and Gone and I Still Throwing the Javelin': Beckett's Athletics. A talk given at the Beckett International Foundation Research Seminar, 18 June 2005

Beckett's Atmospheres. A paper given at the 'After Beckett/Après Beckett' conference, Sydney, January 2003.

Slow Going. A paper given at the Critical Beckett conference held in Birmingham on 26 September 1998. It has been published in print form in Yearbook of English Studies, 30 (2000): 153-65.

How He Was: Samuel Beckett's Lives. Review of two biographies of Beckett.

Beckett and Bion. A paper given at the Beckett and London conference held at Goldsmiths College, London in 1997.

Scribbledehobbles: Writing Jewish-Irish Feet. A paper given at the 'Culture, Modernity and "the Jew" ' conference, Institute of English Studies, 1995.

Dickens

Drood and the Dust of Delight. A talk given at the Edwin Drood Day, Birkbeck College, 13 October 2007. [pdf version]

Forgeries: The Metallurgy of Great Expectations. A talk given at the Birkbeck Great Expectations Day, 24 September 2005.

Gruelling. An expanded version of a review article of Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist (2005), which appeared in the Mail on Sunday on 21st August 2005.

The Perplexity of A Tale of Two Cities (Tastes, Rather Than Glimpses). A talk given at the Tale of Two Cities Day held at Birkbeck, 25 September 2004.

Oxygen Debt: Little Dorrit's Pneumatics. A lecture given at the Birkbeck Little Dorrit Day, 28 September 2002.

Dickens, The Haunting Man: (On L-iterature). An extended version of a paper given at the conference A Man For All Media: The Popularity of Dickens 1902-2002 , Institute for English Studies, July 25-27 2002.

Consequential Ground: The Foot Passengers of Bleak House. A lecture given at the Bleak House Day held at Birkbeck College, 30 September 2000.

Other

Watching the Birdie. A response to the production of To You, The Birdie (Phèdre) by The Wooster Group at the Riverside Studios in May 2002, for a symposium on the work of the Wooster Group at the Cochrane Theatre London, 14-15 May 2002, organised by Andrew Quick and Adrian Heathfield.

Life Writing. An extended review of Ian Campbell Ross, Laurence Sterne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), broadcast as Radio 3's Book of the Month, Wednesday 21 March 2001.

An Airmail From the Monster. A text broadcast on BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves, 31 January 2001, to mark the 150th anniversay of Mary Shelley's death.

Isaac Rosenberg: Birkbeck's War Poet. A lecture given as part of Birkbeck College's Mechanics to Millennium series, 30 October, 2000.

‘A Door Half Open To Surprise’: Charles Madge’s Imminence. A paper given at the Charles Madge and Mass Observation conference held at the University of Sussex, May 12th, 2000.

Modernism and the Writing Hand. An amplified version of a paper given at the Modernism and the Technology of Writing conference organised by Tim Armstrong in the Institute of English Studies, March 26, 1999.

Romanticism, Modernity and Biography. The text of a talk broadcast as BBC Radio 3's `Book of the Month', October 28th, 1997.

Virginia Woolf, the Baby and the Bathwater. Introduction to Virginia Woolf, The Years (London: Vintage, 1992).