Zugl.: Düsseldorf, Universiẗat, Diss., 2006.

O objetivo principal deste estudo é investigar diferentes modos de configurar o silêncio na escrita de Samuel Beckett, reconhecendo-a como um work in progress (obra em processo), por meio da análise de algumas de suas peças teatrais e televisivas, um filme, ensaios e novelas. Para tanto, entendemos o silêncio beckettiano como poética (modo de compor), referindo-o a uma proposta de suspensão e manipulação dramatúrgica de linguagens por uma mimese anti-realista - cujas bases ecoam certos aspectos do pensamento sobre arte de Nietzsche - sendo relida posteriormente por autores como Adorno, Blanchot, Deleuze, Andrade e Lapoujade. Procuramos dar ênfase às imagens corporais como uma das maneiras de Beckett compor uma cena que desfigura os códigos tradicionais de representação para revelar as potencialidades de cada linguagem experimentada. Ao final, propomos uma aproximação de sua poética com criações contemporâneas diversas. / The main purpose of this study is to investigate different ways of configuring silence in Samuel Beckett´s writing, by recognizing it as a work in progress, and also by making analysis of some of his pieces for theatre, television, cinema, critical essays and novels. Thus, we understand beckettian silence as a poetics (mode of composing) reffering it to a proposal of creating language suspension and dramaturgical manipulation in an anti-realistic mimesis - whose basis echoes some aspects of Nietzsche´s ideas about art - which is reread by authors such as Adorno, Blanchot, Deleuze, Andrade and Lapoujade. This research emphasizes body images as one of Beckett´s ways of composing a scene that transfigures traditional codes of representation in order to reveal the potential in each language experienced. By the end, we propose an approach of his poetics to different contemporary works.

Esta dissertação propôs-se a ler Companhia (1980), de Samuel Beckett. Primeiro volume de Nohow on, sua última trilogia, o romance traz ao primeiro plano uma das invenções formais mais instigantes da obra do autor: a voz. Para tanto, foi abordada segundo a teoria da voz de Jacques Lacan, em sua relação com a linguagem e, igualmente, enquanto objeto da pulsão invocante. A partir da psicanálise lacaniana, a voz foi posta em relação com outros aspectos fundamentais da obra de Beckett, tais como o corpo, o luto e o espaço, o que possibilitou aproximações tanto da prosa quanto do teatro do autor. / Reading Company (1980) was the aim of this paper. The first volume of Samuel Beckett´s Nohow on, his last trilogy, the novel brings up to the foreground one of the most thought-provoking formal features of Beckett´s work: the voice. In this reading, voice was approached according to Jacques Lacan voice theory, in what concerns language and, also, as an object of invocatory drive. Departing from Lacanian psychoanalysis, voice was crossed with other fundamental aspects to Beckett´s work, such as the body, grief and space, which allowed to come closer to both his prose and his drama.

Esta tese trabalha uma concepção fundamental para a Psicologia: a de indivíduo, tal como compreendida na obra de Theodor W. Adorno. Neste estudo, essa concepção foi analisada à luz das considerações de Adorno à peça Fim de Partida, de Samuel Beckett. No ensaio Intento de entender Fin de Partida, Adorno avalia essa peça como denúncia realista das condições deterioradas de formação do indivíduo. Para Adorno, é por meio da forma de paródia do drama que a peça expõe a dilaceração das possibilidades de contato entre os homens e destes com a natureza e o mundo. Nesse contexto, outro conceito se fez importante: o de experiência, tal como o entende Walter Benjamin. Esse conceito também foi fundamental para Adorno desenvolver suas análises sobre as condições de constituição do indivíduo. Essas referências iluminam a obra beckettiana, que se desvela em seu aspecto formal como historiografia do sofrimento e explicita o caráter fragmentário e impotente com que a concepção de indivíduo se apresenta na modernidade / This thesis discusses a fundamental conception for Psychology: the individual, as it is conceived in the works of Theodor W. Adorno. In this study, this conception was analyzed in the light of Adorno considerations to the play Endgame, by Samuel Beckett. In the essay Trying to Understand Endgame, Adorno evaluates this play as a realistic denunciation of the deteriorating conditions of the individual\'s formation. For Adorno, is through the form of drama\'s parody that the play exposes the disruption of contact opportunities between the men and between those with the nature and the world. In this context, other concept became significant: the experience, such as Walter Benjamin understands it. This concept was also essential for Adorno develop his analysis of the conditions of the individual\'s constitution. These references illuminates the work of Beckett, which is revealed in its formal aspect as a historiography of the suffering and explains the powerless and fragmentary character that the conception of the individual shows in modernity

A escrita é uma ferramenta poderosa utilizada pelo homem desde que ele descobriu que poderia se comunicar sobre um suporte fixo e não somente pela fala. Ao longo dos anos, o homem desenvolveu essa ferramenta e o suporte onde ela era inserida, transformando e desenvolvendo ambos através de papiros, pergaminhos e códices, até chegar à imprensa, que revolucionou de vez a escrita com a introdução dos sinais de pontuação na mesma. Com o passar dos anos e com o advento da literatura moderna, o suporte textual foi cada vez sendo mais valorizado e trabalhado, até chegarmos a escritores modernos como Samuel Beckett. Mas por que ritmo e escrita? Porque ambos estão intimamente relacionados: não existe escrita sem ritmo. De fato, não há discurso sem ritmo, pois ele é organizado pelo ritmo. Assim, a sintaxe e a pontuação fazem parte do jogo rítmico textual. Pode-se dizer que ritmo, sintaxe e pontuação formam uma tríade poderosa e analisar esses elementos nos três últimos romances de Samuel Beckett é um trabalho importante para se mostrar um trabalho inovador com o ritmo e a escrita. / Writing is a powerful tool used by man since he discovered he could communicate on a fixed support, not only through speech. Over the years, man has developed this tool and support where it was inserted, transforming and developing both through papyrus scrolls and codices, until you get to the press, which revolutionized the writing of time with the introduction of punctuation marks in it. Over the years and with the advent of modern literature, the textual support was increasingly being more valued and worked until we reach modern writers as Samuel Beckett. But why rhythm and writing? Because both are intimately related: there is no writing without rhythm. In fact, there is no speech rhythm as it is organized by the rhythm. Thus, syntax and punctuation are part of textual rhythm game. You could say that rhythm, syntax and punctuation form a powerful triad and analyze these elements in the last three novels of Samuel Beckett is an important job to show innovative work with the rhythm and writing.

Dans l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett, les personnages féminins qui au début sont quasi absents, prennent de plus en plus d’importance et présentent alors différentes images féminines. L’univers féminin qui apparaît ne cesse de prendre de l’ampleur. Pour aborder le fait féminin, il faut prendre en compte les différents langages esthétiques spécifiques des personnages-femmes. En effet, ces langages - faits de diverses tournures imagées -, mettent en exergue l’identité féminine de ces personnages. Ces langages recouvrent de nombreux domaines : corporel, gestuel, scénique et pictural. Cette recherche permet de mieux comprendre le traitement du féminin dans l’œuvre dramatique de Samuel Beckett et de souligner les aspects majeurs des personnages féminins. / In Samuel Beckett’s works the female characters are seen to be absent at the beginning, but throughout the story their presence becomes more significant, and represents the different images of the female characters.The female characters in his work expand and grow constantly.To understand the female characters, we need to analyze the languages that have been used by each character. The languages provide a different image which highlights the identity of each character. They also cover many areas such as body, gestural, scenic, and pictorial. This research paper helps us to better understand how Samuel Beckett deals with feminine in his works, and highlights the major features of the female characters.

This thesis takes up the question of intertextuality between the Bible and Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre. It starts with the contention that this relationship has acquired something of the status of a commonplace within Beckett studies; not that substantial scholarly works have not widened out considerably the way that this is understood, but in Ruby Cohn’s words: ‘today every Beckett student knows his literary allegiances—the Bible and Dante, above all’. The Bible’s status for Beckett comes to be treated as a matter of common sense. In response to this critical situation, one aspect of the thesis is to disclose and analyse previously overlooked examples of the Bible’s presence in Beckett’s work, engaging with hitherto occluded parts of the oeuvre (unpublished manuscript texts and the French works, for example). But at the same time, it looks to critically question what is at stake in the claim that the Bible is a matter of common knowledge for Beckett. The methodology put to work in the thesis always begins in close readings of Beckett’s texts, and also of the discourses surrounding his oeuvre. In doing so, it resists an idea that close reading entails a retreat into an ahistorical formalism; rather, it argues for an historicism that does not simply rest on broad notions of orthodoxy and shared values. Rather than taking for granted a common sense idea of what the Bible is (even in the limited sense of what it is for Beckett), the thesis argues for its instability as a ‘text’ across more than one language. Nor, I argue, does Beckett’s oeuvre fix down a particular, single notion of the Bible as the relevant one for its own purposes (the King James Bible, for instance); on the contrary, his work is deeply engaged with the Bible in all its complex, multilingual textuality. The thesis contends that the particular relationship between Beckett and the Bible poses distinctive problems for the kinds of epistemological value invested in a certain understanding of intertextuality; indeed, I look throughout to interrogate the authority invested in familiarity—both that of the author and that of the critic. Following this thread, the thesis also undertakes a sustained engagement with the way in which archival materials are used and valued by a critical practice interested in questions of intertextuality. Through this, I look to do two things at once: both to respond to the extraordinary value of archival documentation for opening up new possibilities within Beckett studies, and at the same time to analyse closely the extents and limitations of what can be claimed on the basis of such analyses. In working through these kinds of question, and responding to the particular exigencies produced by the Bible in relation to the Beckett oeuvre, I also engage with critical issues having to do with theories of affect, the notion of style (asking what it means to adduce some piece of text as ‘biblical’ or ‘Beckettian’), and the analysis of intertextuality in performance. Through all of these readings, the thesis is interested in what it means to read intertextuality in relation to a Beckett ‘oeuvre’, when the ambit of that oeuvre, its internal interrelationships and its points of connection with the world, constantly shift and reformulate themselves. Rather than treating the Bible as a thread that can be safely followed from one end of the oeuvre to the other, guaranteeing a continuity that remains free from the complexities, irruptions and discontinuities performed in Beckett’s texts, the thesis argues that biblical intertextuality is actively involved in those complex Beckettian movements.

This thesis focuses on three plays written by Samuel Beckett: Play, Not I and Footfalls. Corporeality is the central theme of these works, which also connects them to an important and celebrated source of study and inspiration for the dramatist, The Comedy of Dante Alighieri. The influence played by Dante's descriptions of the body, particularly in the cantica of Inferno, is visible in Beckett's works for the ways in which the organs of perception and expression are treated at both textual and theatrical level. In the three plays the activities of mouth, eyes, ears (and less relevantly, nose) constitute the narrative focus of the text, while the sensorial aspects derived by their presence on stage determine the kind of exchange at play between actors and spectators. Staging immobilized, constricted and barely visible characters who, narrating obscure, uncertain stories, obsessively try to make a sense of their existential and physical conditions, the author gives life to a metatheatrical language rooted on instability and doubt. After the introductory opening chapter, the second chapter looks at the language of Dante's Inferno and at its thematization of corporeality, introducing the continuities between the poem and Beckett's drama. The third chapter juxtaposes the characters and the uncertain...

This thesis carries out an analysis of the plays by Samuel Beckett, Endgame and Happy Days. It achieves this by exploring how the playwright&rsquo / s characterization, setting and use of language in these plays display his tendency to employ some existentialist concepts such as despair, anxiety and thrownness on the way to authenticity. This study argues that there are some similarities between Beckett&rsquo / s two plays and Existentialism, and some characters in both plays display the existentialist man who is looking for becoming an authentic man. In other words, although there are some differences, these plays show that Samuel Beckett&rsquo / s view of Existentialism is quite similar to the Sartrean view.

This dissertation corrects the notion that fiction written in the late 1920s through the early 1940s fails to achieve the mastery and innovation of high modernism. It posits late modernism as a literary dispensation that instead pushes beyond high modernism's narrative innovations in order to fully express individuals' lived experience in the era between world wars. This dissertation claims novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett, as exemplars of a late modernism characterized by invocation and redeployment of conventionalized narrative forms in service of fresh explorations of the dislocation, inauthenticity, and alienation that characterize this era. By deforming and repurposing formal conventions, these writers construct entirely new forms whose disfigured likenesses to the genres they manipulate reveals a critical orientation to the canon. These writers' reconfigurations of forms--including the bildungsroman, the epistolary novel, and autobiography--furthermore reveal the extent to which such conventionalized genres coerce and prescribe a unified and autonomous subjectivity. By dismantling these genres from within, Bowen, Waugh, and Beckett reveal their mechanics to be instrumental in coercing into being a notion of the subject that is both limiting and delimited. These authors also invoke popular forms--including the Gothic aesthetic, imperial adventure narrative, and detective fiction--to reveal that non-canonical texts, too, participate in the process by which narrative inevitably posits consciousness as its premise. I draw upon Tyrus Miller's conception of late modernism to explicate how these authors' various engagements with established forms simultaneously perform immanent critique and narrative innovation. This dissertation also endorses David Lloyd's assertion that canonical narrative forms are instrumental in producing subjectivity within text and thereby act as a coercive exemplar for readers. I invoke several critics' engagements with conventional genres' narrative mechanics to explicate this process. By examining closely the admixture of narrative forms that churns beneath the surfaces of these texts, I aim to pinpoint how the deformation of conventionalized forms can yield a fresh and distinctly late modernist vision of selfhood.