Bloomcast Holiday Special: Watt by Samuel Beckett, Episode 1

Happy Joycension Day!


For this year’s Bloomcast Holiday Special, Alice, Lex, and Adam
reunited for a lively discussion of Watt by Samuel Beckett,
asking: How does Beckett’s minimalist, disintegrative style
compare to James Joyce’s expansive, celebratory storytelling?
What makes this novel so uniquely absurd and profound? And why
does Watt feel both so playful and deeply unsettling? Is Watt a
meticulously structured puzzle or an exercise in unraveling
structure itself? What does Watt tell us about Beckett’s
influence on modern literature?


Setting this enigmatic work against the context of Beckett’s
wartime experiences, they also explore how it challenges
conventional ideas of narrative, language, and meaning. What
is Watt’s lasting impact on readers and thinkers alike? 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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