Abstract/Summary

This thesis examines Beckett’s television works through the methodology of media archaeology and presents the interrelationship between the history of media technology and Beckett’s televisual aesthetics. Media archaeology is a critical framework that provides a new perspective on identifying traces and influences of old, lost and forgotten media in contemporary media forms and focuses on the repetition of the same subject across media. My research focuses on Eh Joe, Ghost Trio, …but the clouds…, Quad, and Nacht und Träume, broadcast from the 1960s to the 1980s, using a media archaeological perspective on both written texts and broadcast versions. Drawing on the biographical facts and testimonies of those involved in Beckett’s television productions, I highlight the differences between the manuscripts, published scripts, and the screenplays that were actually broadcast. In addition, drafts and notes from the Beckett Collection at the University of Reading have been consulted and incorporated into the analysis of the work. This archival research sheds light on creative processes and ideas that have been under-examined in existing studies of Beckett’s television plays, or that have not been linked to specific television productions. It reveals which characteristics of television as a medium that Beckett was interested in. The above findings identify the dramaturgical aspects of Beckett’s television plays that reference the technological development and reception of television of different periods, and the specificities of different audio-visual media such as pre-twentieth century optical devices, painting, film, theatre and radio. Motifs and topics that Beckett had explored in his non-television work (e.g. the dead, the corporeality of women, dreams, memory, self-consciousness, the unconscious, animals) recur in his television works. Through these topics, each teleplay illustrates how the human senses, mainly audio-visual perception, are thematised through the experience of television viewing and, more specifically, how this experience brings to the viewer properties of sound and image that could not be produced by earlier or other media. Through a media archaeological approach, this study demonstrates that Beckett, through his television works, presents television as having a historical inheritance that came into being through the interaction of existing audio-visual media. My case study of Beckett’s television plays demonstrates that the media archaeological method can uncover a televisual aesthetic which reflects Beckett’s incorporation of televisually specific modes of perception and reception, as well as those of earlier media technologies.