This essay discusses the relationship between the characters Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot and the vernacular clowning tradition. The discussion is supported by analyzing similarities between Waiting for Godot and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of grotesque realism as it is presented in his work Rabelais and His World, as well as elements of the Italian Commedia dell’Arte and 20th century silent movie comedy. The essay concludes that Beckett was considerably influenced by vernacular comic elements and utilised these influences in his play Waiting for Godot in order to question the high level of artificiality in Modernist literature.

In this thesis Vicente Huidobro's French "Fragment d'Altazor" (1930) and Spanish Altazor (1931) are compared with Samuel Beckett's English Imagination Dead Imagine (19B5) and French "Imagination morte imaginez" (1967) in terms of the concepts of musical and architectural scale which are common to all of these texts. While the Huidobro works maintain a primarily musical notion of scale, the Beckett texts employ a chiefly architectural one. In Huidobro, the vestigial presence of the diatonic scale in the seven Canto divisions of Altazor together with the chromatic structuring of Canto IV with its dodecaphonic repetition of "No hay tiempo que perder," foreshadow the fully realized tonic scale of the nightingale passage's (IV 193-9) emblematic acrosticism. In Beckett, scale involves measurement with respect to a radix or basic, conventional unit and is used in the precise description of the rotunda, the two figures within, and the flux of light and heat. The Beckettian scale is undercut, however, by the replacement of radices with retrograde and inverted variants. A semiotic approach has been used in the discussion of these texts since it not only foregrounds the importance of pattern as meaningful in itself, but also allows for comparison of two works according to the functioning of their meaning-systems, while permitting analysis at the local, medial, and global levels of the texts. However, in contrast to the theory of a semiotician like Michael Riffaterre, the view taken in this- thesis is that form is an extension of content. Thus the figure/ ground relationship is discussed both in terms of the scales studied and of its value as a theoretical device. Imagination Dead Imaoine/"Imaoination morte imaginez" subverts rational cross-reference by injecting multiple instabilities into the figure/ground relation. By creating a figure, the rotunda, against the backdrop of "anywhere" ("ailleurs") and then removing the figure, the Beckett text effects a realization of "Nulle part." Huidobro's texts, in contrast, employ alternation (e.g., in the tonic-chromatic-tonic scales) to arrive at a non-referential purity of language ("La pura palabra y nada mcis" --III 145). As different as these two texts are in terms of, for instance, genre, length, and diegetical features, they are similar in their refusal, commonly articulated in their use of the multidimensional patterns of scale, to delimit any one particular meaning. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation explores Irish and English fiction before, during, and shortly after the Second World War, a period of complex change in the relations between England and Ireland as British imperial control in Ireland ended. Ireland's neutrality in response to England's declaration of war intensified the nations' apparent differences, yet as my study brings to light, the War also fostered new affinities between England and Ireland, despite each country's inclination to define itself against the other by contrast. Each country's tendency toward xenophobic self-definition gave rise to policies and perspectives that resemble thinking and life in a fascist state. The fiction that I discuss responds to those tendencies by revealing possibilities for collectives that are more dynamically constituted around forms of vision and engagement involving shared responsibility and individual freedom. Chapter 1 reads Virginia Woolf's novel Between the Acts (1941) as a working through of contrasting responses to dictators from a 1938 diary entry and her manifesto Three Guineas, published the same year. I argue that character interactions and self-reflection in response to a play performed in the novel allow characters to recognize fascist tendencies in their own thinking and discover collective visions contrary to the total allegiance prized in Nazi spectacle and English propaganda. Against the mostly ahistorical critical treatments of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman (written 1939-1940, published 1966), Chapter 2 traces affinities between the narrator's deluded belief in his own superiority in a milieu of suppressed violence and the psychological environment Irish neutrality created. Focusing on Elizabeth Bowen's novel The Heat of the Day (1948) and wartime short fiction, Chapter 3 argues that her characters' behavior challenges stereotypes about English and Irish residents promoted by the other country. Rather than offering the escape from the War that some English visitors desire, Ireland provides a vantage point for seeing their London lives in new ways. Chapter 4 takes Nazi narratives of German history as reference points for interpreting Samuel Beckett's Watt (written 1942-1945, published 1953) and Molloy (1955), in particular the narrators' attempts to hide their control over the narratives they shape and the collectives that surround them.

My PhD. thesis "Physiognomy of Writing: In the Folds of Literary Ornament" deals with the relation between literature and ornament. It interconnects the sphere of literary history and literary theory with that of visuality. Ornament is analyzed and interpreted as a theoretical figure which allows an examination of literature from the point of view of its visuality and its movement. This approach, elaborated and applied here, labeled "physiognomy of writing", offers a possibility of a visual reading of literature; it represents a way to read literary texts not only in terms of their meaning and message, but also from the point of view of their visual and figural performance. In the first part I outline the concept of ornament in its historical, esthetic and philosophical frames, and explain how to use it in order to interpret literature. The second part offers readings of several 20th century literary texts (Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Samuel Beckett, Louis Wolfson and Blanche T.) from the perspective of the affinity of their literary speech and particular ornamental manifestations.

The aim of the thesis is to provide a comprehensive view of the works of Samuel Beckett from the beginning to the novel Molloy. It is based on analysis of individual works and the subsequent attempt to uncover their interconnections. The thesis is divided into three parts: theory, poetry and prose. The first part deals mainly with the concept of incoherent reality which Beckett speaks about for the first time in his essay Proust and then returns to in other texts. In the novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women he makes it the basis of his own aesthetic. Behind the phenomena of the outer world lies chaos and nothingness and the artist's task is to integrate it into his work. The second part discusses the changes in the subject of the poems, his being or not being in particular surroundings, the amount of literary allusions, the themes and the form of the poems, above all the particular techniques Beckett uses and the degree of their regularity and elaboration. The third part raises similar questions about prose. The unquestionable centre of Beckett's poems and prose is the subject of the poems and the main character, characterized by tension between inside and outside. The change in the character is caused by outweighing of the tendency to stay inside. This also results in the reduction in allusions...

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These stories are markers of temporal planes, the physical and the emotional, the swift and the fell. They operate at two ends; they are written and so are finitely formed and they are read indefinitely and yet only exist when they are read again. As a writer, this is my means of extension, waiving at the future with my ghost in the voices of my characters. They are also my archive, preserving instances of personal observation in the description of the body, still and living, moving in scene. For accuracy, I've done my best to emulate their movement. The analogy might be of a puppeteer pretending she has strings or better, the sand castles she's made are first only etchings at the shore; their formations quickly washed away and begun again then built better inland. To push metaphor: the description of body and movement within these stories are one kind of mirror and the author is another. The simultaneity of the reader lies between both. Perhaps this is paradoxical: these stories are archival and yet emulate timeless human occasion. I've desired to push metaphor and yet keep clear. My place between clarity and complexity is yet to melt-down from its oasis and gather into something drinkable.

Senses of Freedom explores Walter Pater’s provocative claim that poetry’s defining importance would be to “rearrange the details of modern life” in order to restore the “sense of freedom” lost to modern consciousness. Freedom, variously defined and contested, has long been a central concern to philosophical aesthetics, but few have made its problematics central to an applied criticism. The critical practice I explore asks how form, in a given instance, provides a “sense of freedom” by addressing anxieties of causal determinism, and foregrounding the cultural and linguistic materiality of a subjective perspective. After an introduction outlining and contextualizing a formalist aesthetic criticism drawn from Pater’s work, the dissertation is divided into two parts. Part I surveys aestheticism’s determinist vision (Chapter I) and defines the complex term personality (Chapter II) across Pater’s oeuvre. Aestheticism’s determinism anchors the authorial personality to a network of historically contingent cultural and linguistic determinants; while the personality in turn gives an epistemologically accessible human form to these defining “forces.” Part II exemplifies aesthetic criticism in stand-alone essays on the poetry of three modern authors: Charlotte Mew, Samuel Beckett, and W. H. Auden. In Mew’s work I examine the structure of confinement and passionate renunciation in the form of the hushed tone broken by the “cri de coeur.” In Beckett, I consider the gnomic mode as resolving the problematized space, the “no-man’s land,” between objective and subjective artistic positions. In Auden, I explore how the “gratuitous” and “gratitude” align in his later work, the former an attempt to find artistic freedom within an adequate determinism, and the latter the resolution to recognize world and self in their radical necessity. / 2026-01-31T00:00:00Z

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

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