Reading samuel beckett made me want to link literary and visual studies, although when i first began to love his work, I did not understand that these were different disciplines. A graduate student in the English department at Rutgers University, I read Waiting for Godot while sitting on the floor of my dorm room. I remember really squinting at the pages, trying both to read every word of the play and to see it on a stage in my mind. When I finished, I was convinced I had read the dialogue to a painting. What confused me was whether the painting existed before the play or whether Beckett was trying to create it in the play's performance.