Catalyzing Undergraduate Research: The "Beckett Beyond" Zine Project

Source: https://libguides.tcd.ie/beckettzines/2026 Parent: https://libguides.tcd.ie/beckettzines

Collaborative Teaching for Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Research in the “Beckett Beyond” Module

In Michaelmas Term 2025–26, the “Beckett Beyond” module (DRU34033) ran for the fourth year as a Junior Sophister elective in the Department of Drama. Since its inception, the module has sought to demystify and decentre Samuel Beckett, engaging with his dramatic work both as a fluid legacy and as a solid lens through which to investigate issues, topics and phenomena of our contemporary society. To reframe Beckett’s oeuvre as a portal through which to see beyond, the module fosters a situated, experimental, interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to the Beckettian creative ecosystem. \ \ Collaboration underpins and sustains the module, making it a core pedagogical value and transferable skill for learners to develop. The module originates in the research and pedagogical collaboration between Nicholas Johnson and Céline Thobois-Gupta, which reflects in its research-led teaching design, feeding back into teaching-led research. “Beckett Beyond” is co-facilitated with colleagues from the Department of Drama, the Department of Music, PIX-ART, the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies, and the Library, bringing into interaction a network of voices, expertise and methodologies. Learners are invited to collaborate with this interdisciplinary pedagogical team in the construction of the syllabus through regular consultation, while weekly collective classroom activities support synchronous learning. In the course of the term, the cohort thus develops close ties with the local research community, before contributing their own work to Trinity research. \ \ For their final assessment, each learner becomes an agentic undergraduate researcher and independently designs a mini-research developed with peer- and lecturer-feedback and disseminated in a zine. They are also active members of research support groups, in which they share their challenges and find solutions; in the final week of term, these groups present their research journeys, reflecting on processes, challenges, solutions, outcomes, and impact. Their zines are then exhibited in the Eavan Boland Library as a collaboration between the Library, the Department of Drama and the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies, before being catalogued in the Library’s permanent collection. The Beckett Beyond zine series has thus become a growing resource for the local research community and acts as a flagship project for undergraduate research in the college.\ \ The ethos of the module is reflected in the zines produced this year, which investigate Beckett’s drama through methodologies of theatre and performance studies combined mainly with silence studies, biography and epistolary studies, ecology and Anthropocene studies, philosophy, anthropology, neuroscience and disability studies, thanatology and grief studies, history and art history, gender studies, media studies and the digital humanities. This learner-centred pedagogy of collaboration and interdisciplinarity enables these UG researchers not only to find their way in and through Beckett’s drama, but also to develop a range of professional skills that prepare them effectively towards their Capstone project, Masters programmes and professional career. This project exemplifies how embedding collaboration and interdisciplinarity in undergraduate curricula fosters, promotes and celebrates intellectual independence, collective ambition and rich situated knowledges. Next, Dr Nicole Grimes of the Department of Music reflects on her contribution to one week of this module.

Bringing interdisciplinary research methods to the classroom

By Week 6 of “Beyond Beckett,” the students were already deeply familiar with Beckett’s works and with the critical conversations that surround them. They were also comfortable moving between lecture and workshop, which allowed the session to develop as part of an ongoing inquiry. Bringing Beckett into conversation with Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise (a setting of the poetry of Wilhelm Müller), and opening outward toward Elfriede Jelinek (the Austrian Nobel Prize–winning playwright and novelist whose experimental work often engages music and cultural memory) we explored how musical and dramatic forms shape experience through their handling of sound, time, and silence.\ \ A guiding thread was the word “Fremd” which opens Schubert’s cycle: “Fremd bin ich eingezogen, fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus” (“I arrived a stranger, a stranger I depart.”) The word carries a range of meanings — foreign, strange, unfamiliar, set apart — and invites reflection on what it feels like to stand at a threshold between belonging and exclusion. Thinking through “Fremd” allowed us to consider how the wanderer’s journey unfolds not only as a physical passage but as a movement through states of mind, where memory, longing, and imagination blur the boundary between inner and outer worlds, between the real and the imagined. In Beckett’s theatre, too, figures often inhabit this uncertain space, poised between presence and absence, between speech and silence.\ \ We listened closely to “Gute Nacht” and “Der Leiermann”, tracing how walking, repetition, and tentative gestures toward connection recur across these artistic worlds. Underlying our discussions was a sense of Winterreise as tracing the artist’s passage through estrangement, where each song sounds both as a record of solitude and as a quiet reaching toward an answering presence that may or may not arrive. The encounter with the hurdy-gurdy player suggests how alienation can itself become a form of relation, a fragile moment in which communication persists despite estrangement.\ \ What stood out throughout was the attentiveness of the students. They moved easily between listening, analysis, and imaginative exploration, approaching the works as living questions. The zines that emerged from the module reflect this openness, showing how interdisciplinary inquiry can create space for subtle and searching forms of thought.\ \ Joining the module midway through the term meant entering a learning environment already shaped by a strong sense of shared purpose. Under Céline Thobois-Gupta’s guidance, students approached the material with curiosity and generosity, engaging one another’s ideas with care. My contribution in Week 6 took its place within this wider conversation, offering perspectives on Beckett, Schubert, and Jelinek while remaining responsive to the insights that had already taken shape.\ \ The structure of the session encouraged collective exploration. After reflecting together on themes of belonging and estrangement, repetition, silence, and cyclical time, the seminar invited students to work in groups, translating songs into theatrical situations and imagining dramatic texts through musical sensibilities. Discussion unfolded through exchange and reflection, with each group bringing its own perspective to the material. The classroom became a space in which interpretation developed through shared attention and mutual listening.\ \ These conversations returned repeatedly to a question that runs through the course as a whole: what it might mean to be human. As Noel Witts observes, works by Beckett and those in dialogue with him transform images of loss into forms through which individual figures speak to broader human experience. Thinking about Beckett’s own reflections on solitude, and his profound sense of kinship with Schubert, alongside the stark interrogations of What Where prompted a shared consideration of how artistic practice can create moments of connection even in conditions of isolation.\ \ The Beckett Zines offer a vivid expression of this collaborative spirit. They reflect a learning environment in which ideas circulate freely and are shaped through conversation. Contributing to that shared endeavour was a genuine joy.

Céline Thobois-Gupta and Nicole Grimes

Building Critical Research Skills for Beckett Beyond

It has been my pleasure to support the zinesters in this fourth year of the Library’s collaboration with the Drama Dept on Beckett Beyond. I am again grateful to have been invited into the classroom by Céline early in the module to present the range of catalogues and databases available for research through the Library. \ \ Working with these students at the beginning of their module enables them to grow their research skills and put what they learn into practice immediately. I witness a transformation of information into knowledge and skills as students grow into researchers, authors, and creators. I am rewarded to hear that these skills are providing a solid foundation for students to continue with greater confidence into their final year and sometimes beyond into postgraduate study.\ \ I love to hear each student’s ideas relating to Beckett early in the process, then return a few weeks later to watch presentations and see how ideas have evolved. Through discussions of students’ personal explorations, we learn more about one another, bringing our own personalities and experiences to the conversation. This is as true for me as librarian as it is for the students and results in a deep investment in the project for me.\ \ This year, the Library has invested in a beautiful new exhibition case. This demonstrates a commitment on the part of the Library to promoting student research, including undergraduate work. \ \ Many colleagues from across the Library and College supported Beckett Beyond this year, from advising on the purchase of a new exhibition case to cataloguing the zines so they can be added to the Library’s permanent collection. Thank you to colleagues from Conservation, Research Collections, Readers’ Services, Legal Deposit, Library Communications, and Estates and Facilities.

Helen Bradley, Assistant Librarian

Rediscovering Samuel Beckett Through Trinity’s Academic Community

I am Sarah Collet, a French student at Sciences Po Paris studying Political Humanities and Arts, currently completing the third year of my B.A. as an Erasmus student at Trinity College Dublin. \ \

Before taking Céline Thobois-Gupta’s module “Beckett Beyond,” I had many preconceived ideas about Samuel Beckett and his work. I saw his writing as elitist and inaccessible, deliberately opaque and hermetic, which made me feel excluded from it. And, for a long time, it made me dislike him. \ \ If I decided to attend this module, it was not to torture myself by reading texts in English that I do not even understand in French, but an attempt to meaningfully familiarize myself with Beckett’s work and finally understand why he is considered one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century. \ \ During the term, we met experts in Beckett Studies, Theatre and Performance Studies, Music Studies, and Technostudies, exploring his work through diverse methodologies. We were introduced to Trinity College Library’s Beckett Collection and examined archival materials such as letters, notebooks, and photographs. \ \ After a term immersed in Beckett studies, I shed my preconceived ideas. I came to see that clarity was never his aim. Letting the rhythm of the plays carry me, I learned that we do not need to understand everything in art to be touched, nor need words to communicate. Silence in theatre can speak, silence can say much more than words, and silence can even comfort people when they cannot speak or do not know how to interact with others. Indeed, silence in Beckett’s theatre encapsulates emotions the characters cannot explain or do not feel comfortable expressing with words. \ \ This discovery led me to research silence for my zine, now titled Silence in Beckett’s Theatre. I began with a sociological inquiry into the role of silence in society before focusing on its aesthetic and technical uses in theatre, particularly in Beckett’s drama. To answer these questions, I drew on Trinity College Library’s resources. Helen Bradley’s seminar introduced me to key databases, and I consulted archival documents in the Early Printed Books department. I also explored the embodied impact of silence by watching recorded performances, noting my reactions to grasp Beckettian pauses. \ \ The zine’s flexible format allowed me to explore silence more effectively than a traditional essay, embracing its non-verbal dimension. I gave more space to images and less to words – the medium I am usually most comfortable with. \ \ This course completely changed the way I understand theatre, words and silence. I am pleasantly surprised to now present my own work on such a Beckettian topic, an idea I might once have dismissed in laughter or feared. Beckett has profoundly changed the way I think and engage with the world. \ \ I am addressing here all those who wish to explore Beckett's work: be careful, because once one begins to develop an interest in his artwork, it becomes a potent lens to question everything that surrounds them, everything that was supposed to be “normal”, all their certainties\ \ Sarah Collet

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