Bloomcast Holiday Special: Watt by Samuel Beckett, Episode 2

For the second part of this year’s Bloomcast Holiday Special,
Alice, Lex, and Adam get help from Claire-Louise Bennett and Foad
Dizadji-Bahmani to explore how it challenges conventional ideas
of narrative, language, and meaning. As always, our Bloomcasters
invite listeners into a spirited and thought-provoking
conversation that bridges literary analysis, philosophical
inquiry, and personal reflections…before topping of the
conversation with a game so contrived it would make Blazes Boylan
blush.


*


Alice McCrum is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at
Princeton University. Before starting her graduate work, Alice
lived in Paris, where she taught at the Sorbonne, studied public
policy at Sciences Po-Paris, and directed cultural programming at
the American Library in Paris. 


Lex Paulson is Director of Executive Programs at the UM6P School
of Collective Intelligence (Morocco) and lectures in advocacy and
human rights at Sciences Po-Paris. Trained in classics and
community organizing, he served as mobilization strategist for
the campaigns of Barack Obama in 2008 and Emmanuel Macron in
2017. He served as legislative counsel in the 111th U.S. Congress
(2009-2011), organized on six U.S. presidential campaigns, and
has worked to advance democratic innovation at the European
Commission and in India, Tunisia, Egypt, Uganda, Senegal, Czech
Republic and Ukraine. He is author of Cicero and the People’s
Will: Philosophy and Power at the End of the Roman Republic, from
Cambridge University Press, and is co-editor of the Routledge
Handbook of Collective Intelligence for Democracy and Governance.


Adam Biles is an English writer and translator based in Paris. He
is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. In 2022, he
conceived and presented Friends of Shakespeare and Company read
Ulysses—an epic, polyphonic celebration of James Joyce’s
masterwork. Feeding Time, his first novel, was published by
Galley Beggar Press in 2016. It was published by Editions Grasset
in France in 2018 to great critical acclaim. His second novel,
Beasts of England, was published in September 2023 by Galley
Beggar Press, and will be published in 2025 by Editions Grasset.
It was selected as a "2023 highlight" by The Guardian. A
collection of his conversations with writers, The Shakespeare and
Company Book of Interviews, was published by Canongate in October
2023


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