Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Beckett, Samuel, 1906- Criticism and interpretation'

By fusing many of the established hypotheses on the source of the grotesque in Irish literature, this study establishes that these writers' impatience with all boundaries and limitations, physical or mental, led them to exploit the indeterminacy of the grotesque to achieve their particular aesthetic and epistemological objectives.
After an initial chapter on the relevant theoretical and national considerations, the prodigious cloacal visions of Beckett and Joyce are compared, with emphasis on their use of the grotesque to demythologize the creative process. A fourth chapter compares O'Brien's and Beckett's exploitation of the grotesque to undermine hegemonic philosophical and epistemological systems.
Like most writers of the grotesque tradition, Joyce and O'Brien assume a degree of moral responsibility by affirming, explicitly or implicitly, some traditional or utopian values and standards, while Beckett's deliberations on the complex relationship between Nature, the mind and the body end in negation, impotence and the hope of silence.

This thesis examines Beckett's trilogy as a work of metafiction, approaching each novel through its primary metafictional device, the self-conscious narrator. Since the narrators are aware of their roles as story-tellers, the examination is carried out in light of Beckett's pronouncements on the nature of art and the artist. Not only are the narrators found to meet Beckett's criteria for artists and artistic development, but Beckett's aesthetic is seen virtually to require self-consciousness. In their situations, their relationship to the audience (both reader and narratee) and the nature of their tales, the self-conscious narrators follow the artistic trajectory Beckett maps out in his critical writings. As Beckett's aesthetic is fulfilled, the narrators' increasing self-consciousness intensifies the metafictional aspects of the trilogy. The trilogy is thus a demonstration of Beckett's self-conscious aesthetic--a descent into reflexivity on the part of the narrators, and through the narrators, on the part of trilogy as a whole.

Critical essay. Soon after the end of the Second World War, Samuel Beckett began producing French and English versions of each of his works. This raises interesting questions concerning the relationship between two languages and two texts within one literary work. Bilingualism is an essential dimension of Beckett's "oeuvre" which pushes the very limits of literature and explores essential aspects of language, identity and creation.
Creative writing. I was born in Montreal of a French mother and a father from Texas. My work in creative writing consists of six short stories set between the three geographical poles of my existence: Quebec, the United States and France. I also wrote a French and English version of my short story entitled The Ghost of Old Man Beck. These stories explore, on a more personal and creative level, the questions of bilingualism, identity and creativity raised in my critical essay.

Critics and audiences alike have neglected the idea of Wilde as a precursor to Beckett. But I contend that a closer look at each writer's aesthetic and philosophic tendencies-for instance, their interest in the fluid nature of self, their understanding of identity as a performance, and their belief in language as both a way in and a way out of stagnancy -will connect them in surprising and highly significant ways. This thesis will focus on the ways in which Wilde prefigures Beckett as a dramatist. Indeed, many of the themes that Beckett, free from the constraints of a censor and from the societal restrictions of Victorian England, unabashedly details in his drama are to be found residing obscurely in Wilde. Understanding Beckett's major dramatic themes and motifs therefore yields new strategies for reading Wilde.

This thesis argues that desire is a major theme in Samuel Beckett's dramatic works. Central to our analysis is Jacques Lacan's concept of the Desire for the Other, as the outcome of the human subject's division. We will investigate how desire is expressed at the level of Beckett's characters' utterance. The characters' attempts at and inability to achieve a reconciliation with their speech correlate with the impossibility of reunifying Lacan's split subject. The first part of our discussion focuses upon desire-as-paradox--the lack of will to desire and the continuation of desire--in Not I, Footfalls and Krapp's Last Tape, whereas Rockaby and That Time are indicative of the regression of desire leading toward the characters' death. The second part emphasizes the dramatic presentation of these plays, except for Footfalls. It will become clear that desire affects the performance and the audience, thus preventing them from attaining a unified perception of self and other.

This dissertation offers both a theoretical investigation into the relationships between narrative, knowledge and personhood and a literary critical analysis of a group of Samuel Beckett's works in which narrative, knowledge and personhood are the central themes.
I present an account of the notion of narrative and explore the nature of justified narrative assertions. I then turn to skeptical and anti-realist arguments about the ability of narratives to represent truthfully the world. Such arguments are widespread in postmodernist and poststructuralist circles, and in order to evaluate them, I consider particular arguments of Jean-Francois Lyotard, Christopher Norris and Hayden White, all of whom question the ability of narratives to be true. The positions of these theorists rely upon deep conceptual confusion, and, after sorting out their claims, I conclude that they offer no compelling reasons to doubt that narratives can accurately and truthfully represent the world.
Next, I offer an analysis of the relationship between the notion of personhood and narrative. I argue against postmodernist and poststructuralist critiques of subjectivity, and, drawing on the work of various contemporary philosophers, I defend notions of subjectivity and selfhood while acknowledging and examining the essentially narrative nature of such phenomena. The concept of a "personal history" receives detailed analysis, as does the notion of a "situated self." While agreeing with particular criticisms of what is often called the "modern self," I argue that there are specific normative projects of modernity, namely autonomy and self-realization, that are worth preserving.
Finally, I explore the themes of narrative, knowledge and personhood in the nouvelles of Samuel Beckett. These works represent crises of narrative and personhood, and they depict the epistemic and ethical difficulties encountered by persons under conditions of modernity, conditions in which individual lives often lack narrative unity and meaning. I read Beckett as a critic of culture whose work, while deeply critical of certain trends in modern culture, points to the need for individual subjects to find true and meaningful narratives in which they can participate as co-authors.

This thesis is concerned with the poetics of impoverishment as found in the works of Saint-Denys Garneau and Samuel Beckett. It seeks to shed light on the reactivation of a Christian ascetic heritage within modern writing forms (poetic and narrative) and also, more specifically, to develop a novel analysis of these works from the perspective of their points of overlap. This thesis presents analysis of the relationships between voice and body (part I), of the doppelganger and self-generation figures (part II), of prayer, desert and image motifs (part III) throughout the totality of both corpuses. The comparative reading of the works of Beckett and Garneau highlights the complex relationship they entertain with certain Christian schemes (incarnation, sin, asceticism, kenosis) which they put into play on a properly literary level. This investigation also reveals that, within both works, these Christian schemes echo the aesthetic concerns of modernity (auto-foundation of the subject, authenticity, autonomy and purification of forms).
Key terms: Saint-Denys Garneau, Samuel Beckett, literary modernity, asceticism, poverty, doppelganger, Christianism, French-Canadian literature, French literature, Irish literature

The primary thesis of this dissertation is that the development of narrative strategy and technique through the course of Samuel Beckett’s fictional oeuvre enacts a parody of the Cartesian method of doubt, in which the search for first principles, instead of providing grounds for certainty, is a hopeless, grotesque quest for a self which eludes any and every assertion. My chief concerns are thus, firstly, to explicate and elucidate the nature of such narrative strategies and techniques, and how these can be said to parody epistemological procedure; and secondly, to interrogate the implications of this parody for the epistemological and interpretative endeavour of which the human sciences are comprised. These two issues are explored by way of an examination of Beckett’s earliest novel, Murphy, and the narrative impasse that arises from the contradiction between this work’s largely realist form and quasi-postmodern content. I thereafter argue that the later fiction, most particularly the Trilogy, achieves formal and stylistic solutions to the aesthetic and epistemological challenges raised by the earlier work. Beckett’s fictional oeuvre, I contend, can best be construed as an attempt to attain that which exceeds and escapes narrative in and through narrative, namely madness or death. The achievement of either would entail the obliteration of the possibility of narrating at all, and the novels, engaging in a self-deconstructing endeavour, thus occupy a profoundly paradoxical position. Any attempt to interpret a body of work of this nature can only respond in an analogous manner, by trying to make meaning of the subversion of meaning, and deconstructing the assumptions that inform its procedures. This dissertation argues that it is precisely in the way in which it necessitates such selfreflexive discursive analysis that the import of Samuel Beckett’s fiction lies, and extrapolates the significance of this for an understanding of discourse, literary criticism, and epistemological procedure.

Orientador: Mario Alberto de Santana
Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Artes
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Resumo: Considerando o Silêncio como um elemento inerente aos processos de criação do teatro moderno, esta pesquisa dedica-se à investigação do Silêncio na obra "Esperando Godot", de Samuel Beckett, construindo cuidadosa reflexão sobre a sua presença em categorias específicas da dramaturgia beckettiana. As inquietações que surgiram ao longo da pesquisa convergiram para que essa análise se configurasse a partir da seguinte proposição: o Silêncio que subsiste em "Esperando Godot" não se restringe à partitura das rubricas e ao dialogismo pautado na palavra, mas na dialética construída a partir da linguagem de seus elementos cênicos inseridos na escrita e no visual estético. Por ora, esta pesquisa denomina "Caligrafia Apagada" o Silêncio aqui investigado
Abstract: Considering the Silence as an inherent element to creation processes of Modern Theater, this research is devoted to research the Silence on the Play "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett, building careful reflection on its presence in specific categories in the Beckettiana dramaturgy. The concerns that arose during the research have converged to make this analysis shaped by the following proposition: The Silence that remains in "Waiting for Godot" is not restricted to the punctuation of the rubrics and dialogism based on the word, but in the dialectic constructed from the language of their scenic elements inserted in the writing and the visual aesthetic. For now, this research is called "Off Calligraphy" Silence here investigated
Mestrado
Artes Cenicas
Mestre em Artes

English
Ph.D.
My dissertation demonstrates how representations of schizophrenic characters in novels can combat widespread misuses of psychiatric terms and help readers empathize with mentally ill people if we read these novels with some understanding of psychiatry and the psychoanalysis that influenced them. I undertake a critical genealogy of the schizophrenia concept's migration from the mental health professions to fiction, concentrating on the period from the German invasion of Paris in June 1940 to the events of May 1968, with some attention to contemporary uses of the schizophrenia concept by cultural theorists. Experimental novelists writing during the apogee and aftermath of National Socialism from the 1940s to the 1970s represent schizophrenia as they understood it to express the painful emotions produced by World War II's challenge to the value of experimental writing. In the postwar fiction of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) and Georges Perec (1936-1982), imitating schizophrenia results in careful disclosures of disintegrating life-worlds: in Beckett's case, the dissolution of the James Joyce circle and the communities of modernist exiles it exemplified, which the German invasion of Paris destroyed; in Perec's case, the deaths of his parents in the defense of France and the Holocaust, and the annihilated six million Jews including his mother. Reading Beckett and Perec's novels develops readers' abilities to empathize with both schizophrenic people and the loved ones of Holocaust victims. While those who avoided the concentration camps like Perec did not experience their horrors firsthand, losing relatives and other loved ones transformed their lives, just as losing two thirds of its Jewish population devastated European culture despite reticence to acknowledge the Holocaust's monstrous effects in the postwar years. Late modernist fiction can thus both help readers understand the Holocaust's cultural impact and foster the skills necessary to understand experiences of severe mental disorder. Such empathic understanding is more humane than romanticizing or stigmatizing schizophrenia or other mental illnesses, and it helps us register the Holocaust's degradation of humanity anew rather than walling off this event in the past or regarding it solely as a Jewish issue. Late modernist fiction provides a more precise, caring alternative to the romanticizing/stigmatizing binary perpetuated by postwar cultural theorists because, from the 1930s to the 1970s, the fiction gradually transitions from reinforcing that binary to enabling empathy for traumatized and mentally ill people. Such fiction anticipated recent phenomenologies of schizophrenia - real experiences of distress and impairment rather than socially constructed concepts of madness - and traumatic shame, an emotional experience of oneself or one's community as inadequate in response to failure, especially the Holocaust as a failure of European culture and modernity. Both traumatic shame and severe mental disorder can make the body conspicuous, alienate people from their cultures, and disintegrate structures of salience and belonging that make sustained relationships and projects possible. Recent existential-phenomenological theories of mental disorder enable reintegrating schizophrenia representation in fiction into the history of literary modernism, especially its concern with historical forces disrupting the minds of individuals. These theories explain changes in mentally ill people's sense of possibilities for developing themselves and relating to others, from the way they experience their bodies to the way they use language. Hence I use these theories to demonstrate how knowledge of schizophrenia enabled post-Holocaust novelists to travesty and transform earlier novelists' uses of fictional minds to interrogate cultural change.
Temple University--Theses

Orientador: Fabio Akcelrud Durão
Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
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Resumo: Este trabalho consiste em uma leitura de Fim de Partida, de Samuel Beckett, construída a partir da hipótese de que esta peça, com o que pode ser definido como uma recusa sistemática a tudo o que lhe venha de fora, é capaz de integrar à sua própria estrutura formal os impasses gerados pelas tentativas de interpretá-la, em um movimento que paradoxalmente fortalece cada vez mais sua lógica interna à medida que a interpretação é negada. Ao longo de três capítulos, busca-se investigar as diferentes ramificações dessa ideia como forma de esboçar a posição-limite na qual a peça se encontra: no primeiro capítulo, a hipótese em questão é desenvolvida a partir da leitura de alguns objetos de Fim de Partida, e a partir disso se argumenta que os personagens se aproximam mais de seus objetos fraturados e ausentes do que de pessoas; no segundo, a condição desses personagens é desenvolvida no sentido de um confronto entre duas formas de temporalidade, a progressão e a circularidade, submetidas ao mesmo princípio de escassez que atravessa outros níveis da peça; no terceiro capítulo, a hipótese central é a de que em Endgame são colocados em questão diversos procedimentos do humor de forma altamente destrutiva, e a significação retroativa que seus destroços passam a ter adquirido nesse processo podem ser extrapolados de modo a produzir um pequeno vislumbre, de dentro da própria peça, tanto de seu estatuto de obra de arte, quanto de sua relação complexa com a tradição
Abstract: This work consists in a reading of Samuel Beckett's Endgame built upon the hypothesis that the play, through what can be defined as a deliberate exclusion of everything external to it, is capable of integrating the resulting deadlocks from the attempts of its interpretation to its own formal structure, in a paradoxical movement that strengthens the play's internal logic through the denial of interpretation. Throughout three chapters, this work aims to explore different ramifications of that idea in order to outline the boundary represented by the play: in the first chapter, the interpretative hypothesis is developed upon a reading of the objects of Endgame, culminating in the idea that its characters are closer to the absent and fractured objects that they demand than to proper persons; in the second chapter, their condition is developed in the sense of a confrontation between two forms of temporality, progression and circularity, which are submitted to the same principle of scarcity that penetrates other levels of the play; in the third chapter, the central hypothesis is that Endgame puts into question some procedures of humor in a highly destructive manner, and that the retroactive meaning acquired by the resulting ruins of this process may be extrapolated into a glimpse, from within the play itself, both of its status as a work of art and of its complex relationship with tradition
Mestrado
Teoria e Critica Literaria
Mestre em Teoria e História Literária

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 309-330) Resists the notion of a subversive Beckett appropriated by the cultural mainstream, by tracing the discursive limits of avante-garde writing, and by exploring how Beckett paradoxically reinforced the traditional author-function even as he appeared to challenge it.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 309-330)
vii, 330 leaves ; 30 cm.
Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library.
Resists the notion of a subversive Beckett appropriated by the cultural mainstream, by tracing the discursive limits of avante-garde writing, and by exploring how Beckett paradoxically reinforced the traditional author-function even as he appeared to challenge it.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 2001

Over the course of his life Beckett's work moves through a process of reduction toward increasing simplicity and concentration of means. 1 trace this reduction in Beckett's later works for the stage and compare it with the dialectics of negative theology, both Buddhist and Orthodox Christian, paying particular attention to structures of visuality and iconicity (both visual and not) in Beckett's work. The visual enjoyed a status of peculiar ontological primacy for Beckett. In it he saw exemplified both the dualisms he worked to overcome throughout his career and the saving grace that will overcome them: a "breathless immediacy" (Beckett's words) that will skip the mediation of language and the linearity of discourse and present exquisitely balanced, essentially still, nondual images. Beckett's metaphorical, that is, vertically structured stage images are subtended by metonymic texts that run through a strategic process of self-emptying in a kind of kenosis of discourse. The aporetic figures thus produced form similarly iconic structures on the textual level as can be found on the visual level. In Beckett's horizontal world a displaced sacramentalism and a phenomenologically motivated process of enquiry into the nature of things combine to create an empty space, a gray area through which the divine can enter if the audience is inclined to make such an act of faith. Beckett creates an art of Erfahrung that leads to a confrontation with an Other beyond the limits of a reductive concept of instrumental reason.

Although Samuel Beckett's plays indicate his abiding interest in the complex functioning of memory, little has been written on the topic. The aim of this study, therefore, is to examine the wide-ranging, specific approaches towards recall and forgetting that he reflects in his drama. Because conversational strategies are grounded in cognitive processes, the interplay between memory and discourse will also be probed. The thesis foregrounds Beckett's profound distrust of memory functioning, as well as his conviction that `yesterday' has dangerous power to `deform'. Through his own perception and his psychological study of dysfunctional, decaying and trauma-charged memories, he is able to apply a comprehensive knowledge-base to the creation of his time-damaged characters. In the scrutiny of their autobiographical memories, the reconstructive and imaginative components become apparent. These are mainly shown to alienate characters from one another, so that Beckett's claim that memory can remedy suffering becomes questionable. The investigation is informed by a variety of critical disciplines, as well as insights derived from the Proust Monograph. Beckett's investigation of the psychology of the 1930s is evaluated, in addition to current medical and psychological research into gerontology, amnesia, dementia, and the repressed or obsessive memories of the neurotic. Conway's work on the characteristic features of autobiographical memory illuminates relevant Beckett plays. An appraisal of discourse studies focuses on language and power, phatic communication and the multiple speech acts that reflect the functioning of normal and dysfunctional memory. Reference to the work of Lacan and Derrida enhances discussion of the inadequacy of language. To give due attention to the theatrical component of Beckett's drama, enactment, performance criticism and audience reception of his plays are discussed.
English Studies
D.Litt. et Phil.

Coleman, Tara Jean.
Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 144-149).
Abstracts in English and Chinese.
Introduction --- p.1
Chapter Chapter 1 --- p.26
Chapter Chapter 2 --- p.61
Chapter Chapter 3 --- p.102
Conclusion --- p.141
Bibliography --- p.144

by Mak Mei Kwan Alisa.
Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2000.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 108-115).
Abstracts in English and Chinese.
Abstract --- p.i
摘要 --- p.iii
Acknowledgements --- p.v
Chapter Chapter One: --- The Displaced Man --- p.1
Chapter Chapter Two: --- The Fragmented Self in Xiguan siwang [Getting Used to Dying] --- p.19
Chapter Chapter Three: --- Death of the Author: An Abandoned Beingin Malone Dies --- p.46
Chapter Chapter Four: --- Death of Sharing: A Man of Authenticityin The Outsider --- p.67
Chapter Chapter Five: --- Conclusion: The Helplessness of Life --- p.94
Works Cited --- p.108
Works Consulted --- p.115

Li Mei-yee.
Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-106).
Abstracts in English and Chinese.
Abstract --- p.i
摘要 --- p.iii
Acknowledgements --- p.iv
Contents --- p.vi
Introduction: Questions about Reading --- p.1
Chapter Chapter 1 --- Waiting for Godot and the Issue of Absurdity --- p.28
Chapter Chapter 2 --- At the Hawk's Well and the Drama of the Interior --- p.59
Conclusion --- p.90
Note --- p.100
Works Cited --- p.101

Lee, Tin Yan Grace.
Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves [106-111]).
Abstracts in English and Chinese.
Introduction --- p.1
Chapter Chapter 1: --- Laughter and Man --- p.15
Chapter Chapter 2: --- Laughter and Man's Obligation to Persist in Beckett's Endgame --- p.37
Chapter Chapter 3: --- Laughter and Self-Knowledge in Pinter's The Birthday Party --- p.68
Conclusion --- p.100

This dissertation articulates the relationship between literary form and unconscious affect in fictions by Cesare Pavese, Samuel Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Drawing from contemporary psychoanalytic object-relations theory, including the work of W.R. Bion and the Bionian school, it defines three paradigmatic forms of psychic work — reparation, containment and construction — that structure the intersubjective unconscious responses to specific formal challenges. It claims that the psychic work involved in meeting those challenges is both “historical” — in the sense that it reveals elements of each text’s historicity and political valence within their cultural setting — and “productive,” in the sense that it entails a degree of psychic growth for the reader. This dissertation bridges literary history, psychoanalytic theory and reader-response theory. It seeks to intervene in each discipline’s debates: in literary-historical terms, it argues that the psychic work of reading must be understood as constitutive of the texts’ expression of the context of the postwar and as part of their struggle to move beyond the aesthetic of modernism. In psychoanalytic terms, it joins in the lively discussion about the historical specificity of the mechanisms theorized by object-relations theory. Finally, at the level of literary theory, it seeks to affirm the value of Bion’s model of object-relations in theorizing reading as a transformative process characterized by intense unconscious, intersubjective activity. The dissertation is organized in three literary chapters, followed by a theoretical chapter. Taken together, the first three chapters represent the evidence for the need of a concept of psychic work in reading late modernist fiction and for the potential payoffs of formulating such a concept. Chapter 4 consists of four theoretical “notes,” addressing, in broad terms, the resonance of intersubjective notions of psychic work for reading, criticism and literary theory.