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Title
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From 'Inferno' to Sorrento: Dante, Wartime Radio and the Italia Prize
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Author
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Abstract
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| This article traces the Italian influences in Beckett’s radio plays, beginning with Dante’s 'Divine Comedy' and its intertextual significance for 'All That Fall', 'Embers' and 'Rough for Radio II' in particular. In the next step, these texts are further analysed together with 'Words and Music' against the historical backdrop of the Second World War, when radio broadcasting contributed significantly to the rise of Fascism in Europe. Finally, I will read 'Cascando' through a biographical lens, in light of Beckett’s 1959 trip to Sorrento, where he attended the Italia Prize awards ceremony accompanied by BBC producer Donald McWhinnie. In doing so, on the one hand, the chapter shows how Beckett used Dante to gradually develop a generic radiophonic space that is marked by a lack of sight and dissociated from any specific geography or nationality. On the other hand, it illustrates how this seeming universality is, at the same time, infused with different cultural contexts that merge almost beyond the point of recognizability. These frameworks are not limited to Ireland, which permeates the early radio plays especially, or France, Beckett’s permanent home that put him at an even further remove from his native country in linguistic terms. Germany, which he visited throughout his career, and by extension Italy, where he spent the least time, should not be neglected as crucial in-between spaces that help to navigate the seeming no man’s land of Beckett’s later radio plays. |
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Language
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English
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Source (book)
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Samuel Beckett and the arts: Italian negotiations / Crosara, D. [edit.]; et al. [edit.]
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Source (series)
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Anthem Studies in Global English Literatures
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Publication
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London
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Anthem
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2024
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ISBN
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978-1-83998-966-7
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Volume/pages
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p. 88-108
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Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
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