Em Busca de uma Poética do Vazio é uma pesquisa teórico-prática fomentada no Núcleo de Pesquisa Beckett-we – espaço de criação, desconstrução e de transbordamentos criativos a partir do universo de Samuel Beckett. Criado no ano de 2012 em Canoas/RS, o Núcleo dá voz aos aqui chamados esgotados, sujeitos contemporâneos que encontram em Beckett uma possibilidade de diálogo e caos. Os participantes não são atores, nem bailarinos, nem pesquisadores, são PIM: massa de corpos que não aguentam mais, unidos por uma pequena vida – extrato de existência em comum, que transcende as referências culturais, geográficas, étnicas ou históricas – PIM é plural. Este escrito é composto pelas vozes de esgotados, de Beckett, por minha voz, por fluxos de pensamento que me atravessaram durante a pesquisa e pela voz de referências significativas neste estudo: Gilles Deleuze, Suely Rolnik, Peter Pál Pelbart, dentre outros tantos. São analisadas performances criadas durante três anos do Núcleo, a partir dos textos: Todos os que Caem (Beckett - 1957) que se transformou em Eu, Ser Pulsante e Semivivo (2013) e Eleutheria (Beckett - 1947) metamorfoseado em sobre.vida (2015), Ensaio sobre a Liberdade (2014) e inspiração (2014). Buscando fazer um paralelo estrutural com a obra Como É (Beckett, 1961), que se passa em um buraco enlameado, no qual um personagem procura seu parceiro – PIM -, esta pesquisa se propõe a investigar os caminhos que foram inventados durante as práticas, visando se aproximar de uma possível metodologia que se encontra no vazio, buscando constantemente a instabilidade – seja através da tentativa de esvaziamento de referências, no diálogo com os esgotados que são desconhecedores de Beckett ou na renovação constante de PIM. No ato de esvaziar-se e se deixar atravessar pelas vozes e impulsos dos envolvidos, alimentados pelo universo beckettiano, esta dissertação sugere a figura do cartógrafo, desenvolvida por Rolnik, como um possível caminho para a prática criativa no vazio. / In Search of a Poetic of Emptiness is a theoretical-practical research fomented in the Núcleo de Pesquisa Beckett-we (Research Group Beckett-we) - space of creation, deconstruction and creative overflows based on the universe of Samuel Beckett. Created in the year of 2012 in Canoas/RS, the group gives voice to the ones here called the exhausted , contemporary subjects that find in Beckett a possibility of dialogue and chaos. The participants are not actors, nor dancers, nor researchers, they are PIM: a mass of bodies that cannot bear anymore, united by a little life - extract of a common existence, that transcends the cultural, geographical, ethnic or historical references - PIM is plural. This writing is composed by the voices of the exhausted, Beckett’s voice, my own voice, by flows of thoughts that crossed me while researching and by the voice of significative references in this study: Gilles Deleuze, Suely Rolnik, Peter Pál Pelbart, among so many others. Here we analyse performances created during the three years of the group, based on the texts: All that fall (Beckett - 1957) that became Eu, ser pulsante e semivivo [Me, pulsing being and halfalive (2013) and Eleutheria (Beckett - 1947) metamorphosed in sobre.vida [about.life] (2015), Ensaio sobre a Liberdade [Essay about Freedom] (2014) and inspiração [inspiration] (2014). Aiming to create a structural parallel with the work How it is (Beckett - 1961), that passes in a muddy hole, in which one character looks for his partner - PIM -, this research proposes itself to investigate the paths that were invented during the practices, aiming to approach a possible methodology found in the emptiness, searching constantly the instability - be it through the attempt of emptying references, in the dialogue with the exhausted who are unfamiliar with Beckett or in the constant renovation of PIM. In the act of emptying itself and letting it be crossed by the voices and impulses of the involved, fed by the beckettian universe, this dissertation suggests the figure of the cartographer, developed by Rolnik, as a possible path for the creative practice in the emptiness.

Tracing the Material considers how James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy represent material spaces and objects as a way of engaging with the fraught histories of England and Ireland. I argue that these three writers use spaces and objects to think through and critique nineteenth and early twentieth-century conflicts and transitions, particularly in the areas of empire, nationalism, gender, and family. Writing in the 1920s and 1930s, in the decline of British ascendency, the rise of the Irish Free State, and between the World Wars, these writers seek to interpret their history through the material world as a way of articulating their political, cultural, and social dissatisfactions, and to imagine the future. Drawing in part from Walter Benjamin’s materialist historiography and Jacques Derrida’s texts on spectrality and mourning, I investigate how the material world becomes the means through which nations and individuals express their guilt and desires, mourn losses, cut their losses, articulate the present, and anticipate the future. A study of the material world in these novels thus yields insights into how literary texts respond to history, both overtly and implicitly, foregrounding the importance of physical spaces and things in the larger narratives of national and personal history. My dissertation offers a new understanding of the way twentieth-century literature navigates its history through materiality, destabilizes subject-object distinctions, and exposes the often-unexpected power of the non-human world.

Shoah laisse une empreinte sur l’écriture de Samuel Beckett, elle la façonne, l’affecte, la contamine, alors qu’elle n’est jamais explicitement nommée dans l’œuvre. Dans ses textes d’après-guerre, depuis la trilogie jusqu’à Soubresauts, on remarque une évolution de la forme : textes saturés et phrases interminables, répétitions et enfin textes de plus en plus vides. En observant ces phénomènes, cette thèse interroge un rapport innommé et innommable entre Shoah et l’écriture de Beckett. Elle observe cette forme que Shoah donne à l’écriture en l’épuisant, en cherchant à la saturer, en la saccageant et enfin en lui faisant porter les marques de la disparition. Dans un préambule nécessaire, on contextualisera et expliquera la notion de corps concentrationnaire, concept clé de cette thèse en tentant de la définir afin de justifier le lien entre l’image de ce corps et la figure qui surgit dans l’univers beckettien jusque dans la forme même du texte. Dans une première partie, on analysera tout d’abord le phénomène de l’épuisement du corps dans l’univers beckettien en faisant le parallèle avec l’univers concentrationnaire. On soulèvera à la fois la question de l’inaboutissement de toute action, son inachèvement, son sisyphéen et interminable recommencement. On analysera ce même phénomène d’épuisement dans l’écriture beckettienne, qui comme le corps, signifie à la fois l’exténuation physique, matérielle, un « puisement » qui vide. Dans la deuxième partie, on verra une certaine forme de continuité de cet épuisement dans le phénomène de la défiguration qui est une suite de la réduction du corps à son utilité d’animal ou de machine, à l’anonymat, au dépérissement total de l’individualité alimenté par la répétitivité abrutissante de certaines tâches, de certains gestes et de mouvements. Le corps du personnage beckettien dont le potentiel a été démoli en fin de compte ne peut que se transformer en figure dégradée, irreconnaissable, détruite. De la même façon, l’écriture qui ne cesse d’échouer se brise, se déforme tout en continuant à s’acharner à se donner une forme. C’est cet acharnement qui la ruine. Enfin, dans un troisième temps, on soulèvera la question de la disparition qui fait partie de cette dégradation. La disparition des corps et de la forme, l’image disparue, l’absence et le texte qui s’efface hantent l’écriture becketienne. Mais ces absences laissent malgré tout une empreinte, une manière de refléter ou d’aborder Shoah et « ce qui reste » de Shoah. Ce phénomène de disparition marque incontestablement la forme à travers les éclats, les bribes, les vides, un texte qui se présente en s’effaçant. Reste une trace du manque, du manque d’images et de mots. L’écriture de Beckett ne peut être qu’incomplète, trouée, lacunaire pour dire ou pour laisser entrevoir Shoah, sans jamais la nommer ou la montrer. / The Shoah leaves an imprint on Samuel Beckett's writing, it shapes it, affects it, contaminates it, even though it is never explicitly named in the work. In his post-war texts, from the trilogy to Soubresauts, we see an evolution of form: saturated texts and interminable phrases, repetitions and, finally, texts that become more and more empty. By observing these phenomena, this thesis questions an unnamed and unspeakable relationship between the Shoah and Beckett's writing. This study observes this form that the Shoah gives to writing by exhausting it, saturating it, sacking it and finally make it bear the marks of disappearance. In a necessary preamble, we will contextualize and explain the concept of the concentrationary body, a key concept of this thesis, by trying to define it to justify the connection between the image of this body and the figure that arises in the Beckettian universe even down to the text’s form. In a first part, we will analyze the phenomenon of the body’s exhaustion in the Beckettian universe by drawing a parallel with the world of concentration. At the same time, we will raise the question of the inability of all action, its incompletion, and its Sisyphean, endless renewal. This same phenomenon of exhaustion will be analyzed in Beckettian writing, which, like the body, signifies both physical and material depletion, a using-up that empties. In the second part, we will see a certain form of continuity of this exhaustion in the phenomenon of disfigurement which follows from the body’s reduction to its use-value as animal or machine, to its anonymity, to the total withering away of its individuality fueled by the mind-numbing repetitiveness of certain tasks, gestures and movements. The body of the Beckettian character whose potential has been demolished can ultimately only turn into a degraded, unrecognizable, destroyed figure. In the same way, the writing that continues to fail breaks down, becomes distorted even as it continually strives to give itself a form. It is this relentlessness that ruins it. Finally, in a third moment, we will raise the question of the disappearance that is part of this degradation. The disappearance of body and form, the disappeared image, the absence and the fading text haunt Becketian writing. But these absences still leave an imprint, a way of reflecting or addressing the Shoah and “what remains” of it. This phenomenon of disappearance undeniably marks the form through scraps, fragments, nothingness, a text that presents itself as fading away. Traces of emptinesss, of missing images and words, remain. Beckett's writing can only be incomplete, unwhole, in order to say or suggest the Shoah without ever naming or showing it.

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As literary modernism was emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of its most important figures and precursors began to talk about their own writing as a kind of starvation. My doctoral thesis considers the reasons for and development of this previously little-explored trope, arguing that hunger becomes a focal point for modernism’s complex relationship to aesthetic autonomy. I identify a specific tradition of writers, beginning in the nineteenth century with proto-modernists such as Melville and Rimbaud, flourishing in the pivotal figures of Knut Hamsun, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, and expiring with modernist-influenced contemporary writers such as Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee. Although these writers are avid readers and devoted disciples of one another, mine is the first study to read them alongside one another as a coherent literary tradition. Reading them in this way, I am able to trace the development of the ‘art of hunger’ as a locus for a crisis in aesthetic autonomy that spans the twentieth century. I develop this line of argument in two phases. In the first, I trace the emergence of an art of hunger out of modernist engagements with philosophical aesthetics and its notions of aesthetic autonomy. Readings of the “art of hunger” in Herman Melville, Arthur Rimbaud, Knut Hamsun, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett’s post-war work reveal that starvation carries autonomy to an extreme and hyper-literal endpoint, revealing both its desirability as an aesthetic ideal and the impossibility of art’s complete autonomy from the body, the market or the social dimensions of language. In the second phase, I consider how this trope has animated later twentieth-century engagements with modernism. For authors writing in the aftermath of modernism, hunger provides a way of considering new complications to aesthetic autonomy in the light of both their debt to modernism and their specific historical circumstances. In this light, I consider three different extensions of the modernist art of hunger: its absorption into high formalism in Beckett’s late prose; its collapse in the face of an emerging concern with the social in Paul Auster; and its transformation into an ethical aesthetics of food taboos, restriction and asceticism in J. M. Coetzee.

This thesis articulates the resonances between J.M. Coetzee's lifelong engagement with mathematics and his practice as a novelist, critic, and poet. Though the critical discourse surrounding Coetzee's literary work continues to flourish, and though the basic details of his background in mathematics are now widely acknowledged, his inheritance from that background has not yet been the subject of a comprehensive and mathematically- literate account. In providing such an account, I propose that these two strands of his intellectual trajectory not only developed in parallel, but together engendered several of the characteristic qualities of his finest work. The structure of the thesis is essentially thematic, but is also broadly chronological. Chapter 1 focuses on Coetzee's poetry, charting the increasing involvement of mathematical concepts and methods in his practice and poetics between 1958 and 1979. Chapter 2 situates his master's thesis alongside archival materials from the early stages of his academic career, and thus traces the development of his philosophical interest in the migration of quantificatory metaphors into other conceptual domains. Concentrating on his doctoral thesis and a series of contemporaneous reviews, essays, and lecture notes, Chapter 3 details the calculated ambivalence with which he therein articulates, adopts, and challenges various statistical methods designed to disclose objective truth. Chapter 4 explores the thematisation of several mathematical concepts in Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country. Chapter Five considers Waiting for the Barbarians and Foe in the context provided by Coetzee's interest in the attempts of Isaac Newton to bridge the gap between natural language and the supposedly transparent language of mathematics. Finally, Chapter 6 locates in Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year a cognitive approach to the use of mathematical concepts in ethics, politics, and aesthetics, and, by analogy, a central aspect of the challenge Coetzee's late fiction poses to the contemporary literary landscape.

This thesis analyses the responses of Irish writers and painters to a phase of national self-assertion that had arguably lost its liberating potential. It shows how the exhaustion of revolutionary pressures in Ireland after independence complicates the ties between creative activity and political activism. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship within political theory, literary criticism and art history, I chart an emerging network of literary and artistic techniques that confronts the representational aesthetics of the nation with strategies of paradox, reversal and renewal. My readings of the work of Denis Devlin, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Mainie Jellett, Jack Butler Yeats and, in particular, Thomas McGreevy, provide a means by which to distinguish other cultural possibilities that were imagined and pursued from 1922 to 1941, including McGreevy’s own aspiration to remould 'A Cultural Irish Republic'. The thesis argues that Ireland's political and artistic avant-garde were forcibly divided during this period: two factions that had been split apart by the effects of civil war and censorship. As such it will be preoccupied with a central question: how to sustain cultural strategies of revolutionary significance when the frontier between creative activity and political activism can no longer be straightforwardly crossed.

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Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-14T13:54:49Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 346085.pdf: 922279 bytes, checksum: 42f43e4daa3e7a56028f9c873c41fe44 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006-04-10 / O trabalho exp?e a dupla face da Cr?tica da faculdade de ju?zo est?tica de Kant, explorando seus desdobramentos na compreens?o dos fen?menos est?ticos. A primeira face ? representada pelo prazer da beleza, ?ndice de harmonia entre o modo como o mundo natural se organiza e as faculdades do conhecimento (imagina??o e entendimento) em livre-jogo. Apesar de os ajuizamentos de gosto serem reflexivos, n?o determinados por um conceito, o prazer que os acompanha funciona como uma esp?cie de garantia sens?vel da nossa capacidade de conceptualizar em geral. A segunda face ? representada pela experi?ncia do abalo, da ruptura de tal harmonia, que leva o nome de sublime. O sublime, juntamente com as figuras do g?nio e das id?ias est?ticas, indica para a insufici?ncia do pr?prio sujeito como portador de conceitos na compreens?o de certos objetos. Considerando essa for?a negativa, o sublime fornece uma porta de entrada para o exame da arte contempor?nea, principalmente na literatura. O romance O inomin?vel, de Samuel Beckett, ? um dos casos em que ? poss?vel constatar os desdobramentos da experi?ncia do sublime, a partir de tr?s aspectos b?sicos: 1) a constru??o de uma narrativa cuja din?mica formal ? caracterizada por constantes d?vidas e autonega??es, impedindo uma compreens?o est?tica como totalidade org?nica; 2) a presen?a de passagens po?ticas que evocam no leitor o encontro com o indiz?vel e o n?o-sil?ncio que a? se esconde; 3) como o eu autoconsciente e organizador do mundo, elemento recorrente da filosofia da consci?ncia, ? transformado num eu m?nimo marcado pela suspeita sobre sua pr?pria exist?ncia.

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