Chaos and Form: Echoes of Beckett in Literature, Theatre and the Arts

The colloquium, commemorating Samuel Beckett’s 110th anniversary, will focus on a topic which played a crucial role both in Beckett’s work and in his published reflections: the function of form in art. It can serve to expose the chaotic nature of the world we live in or to construe an artificial order and impose it on (our picture of) the world. According to Beckett, the latter is typical for great literary manipulators and „masters of their material“, while the former equals resigning upon any „mastery“ of this kind and engaging in a never-ending search for a form that would not serve as tool of artistic engineering.