Samuel Beckett has long been known as a philosophical author, who drew on philosophical work to create haunting images and intricate texts that are felt by later thinkers to express so well their own questioning of the foundations of Western thought. On the other hand, Beckett's own interests lay with philosophical writers of the 17th and 18th centuries. This thesis looks at the way Beckett infuses the tenets and metaphors of the 18th -century philosopher George Berkeley with new meanings that transform early modern theories into artistic works that continue to appeal to audiences and thinkers to this day. Research into Beckett's philosophical sources was an important subject from early Beckett criticism onwards. Significant early works include Ruby Cohn's "Philosophical Fragments in the Works of Samuel Beckett" (1964);1 John Fletcher's "Beckett and the Philosophers" (1965);2 and Edouard Morot-Sir, "Samuel Beckett and Cartesian Emblems" (1976).3 What is common to these essays and other research published at the time is the identification of Beckett's thinking with a Cartesian stance. The increasing amount of archive materials available to researchers, including letters, his personal notes, and the books left in his library after his death, has had a tremendous impact by showing that Descartes was...

The play Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett has for a long time been considered one of his best works. Grasping the significance of key factors such as modernity, modernism and historical background is of great importance to situate and contextualise the play. As Beckett´s play belongs to the “Theatre of the Absurd”, the complicated aspects of where the play belongs has given opportunities for questioning. The intricate layers of the play have opened several doors for interpretation which has allowed diverse conclusions from various researchers. For that reason, further investigation on that matter may perhaps add another viewpoint which can be considered important to fully understand the potential of this piece. This essay examines Samuel Beckett´s famous play Waiting for Godot through the complex lens of Soren Aabaye Kierkegaard´s and Jean-Paul Sartre´s perspectives within the existentialist philosophy. Certain features of each perspectives within the philosophy such as the for-itself,in-itself and the three stages consciousness facilitate the linkage needed between the play and the theory. By using these two perspectives, this essay analyses how the elements of nothingness, purpose and meaning are apparent throughout the play. The analysis of the essay was done to: firstly, attempt to discover new possible meanings and secondly, to deepen and widen my understanding of the Beckett´s play. This essay argues that these elements provide evidence that the play contains components of both Sartre´s and Kierkegaard´s perspective of existentialism.

This paper suggests that a reconceptualization of the structuralist framework of story anddiscourse, the foundational concept of narrative theory, is needed in order to account for postmodernist texts. It reframes story and discourse as an “intra-textual” approach, wherein individual narrative strata are understood as equal and interrelated voices within a text, thus refusing to privilege any one aspect over another. In other words, I work to build a method of narrative analysis that interrogates form as it manifests across various levels of narrative, uncovering the patterns, connections, fissures and inconsistencies that emerge within and between the various levels in order to produce meaning. The paper then employs this method through a reading of Samuel Beckett’s postwar Trilogy that argues against traditional critical interpretations of the text, thus presenting a new possibility for historicizing Beckett at the midcentury mark.

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Nous traitons la question d’un rapport entre écriture et voix dans la clinique des psychoses. A l’appui des témoignages de sujets psychotiques, sujets disant écrire ce qui survient sous forme de voix, nous interrogeons les ressorts et les enjeux de ce passage à la lettre. Revenant sur la clinique de l’hallucination, nous détaillons ce que les sujets psychotiques nous enseignent sur les mécanismes impliqués dans l’instant de la voix hallucinée. Suivant ce fil, nous mettons en valeur la dimension de jouissance inhérente à la voix. Dans un second temps, nous nous penchons plus spécifiquement sur les pratiques d’écriture des sujets rencontrés, pratiques où il s’agit de noter, d’arrimer sur papier ce que les voix font entendre. Suivant les pistes annoncées par nos patients, nous questionnons la fonction régulatrice d’une pratique de la lettre. Pour ce faire, nous reprenons les conceptions lacaniennes de la lettre comme « littoral » ou comme « godet ». De même, les propos de nos patients nous mènent à interroger en quoi l’écriture pourrait permettre de « faire partir » la voix, en quoi elle ferait le moyen d’un détachement. Les œuvres et les témoignages d’écrivains nous donnent l’occasion de pousser plus avant notre questionnement, d’arpenter les domaines où, toujours, l’artiste précède le clinicien. Ainsi, nous revenons sur les travaux de James Joyce, de Louis Wolfson et, surtout, de Samuel Beckett. Nous nous penchons sur les indications qu’ils nous livrent au sujet d’un nouage entre écriture et voix. L’objet de notre recherche est de mettre à l’épreuve l’hypothèse selon laquelle, dans la clinique des psychoses, le recours à l’écrit peut relever d’un traitement de la voix. / We examine the issue of a link between voice and writing in psychosis. Relying on psychotic subjects who say they write what they hear through voices, we study the nature of this shifting from voice to letter. As a first step, we specify what we mean by voice. We detail what psychotic subjects teach us about the mechanisms involved in the moment of the hallucinated voice. By doing so, we point out the part of jouissance involved in voice.As a second step, we focus on their writing practices, the moment when they take note, when they put down on paper what they hear through voices. We endeavour to elucidate the issues of this movement. We are led to examine the regulating function of writing. Therefore, we refer to the lacanian concept of letter as « littoral » or « godet ». Moreover, patients’ words led us to specify how writing could be a way to make the voice “go away”, a way to separate. The works and the testimonies of writers lead us to go on exploring a field where the artist always precedes the clinician. We refer to James Joyce, to Louis Wolfson, and especially, to Samuel Beckett’s works. We try to grasp the indications they give about a link between voice and writing. The purpose is to test the hypothesis which states that, in psychosis, the use of writing can be a way to treat the voice.

Publicado em 1956 em inglês, Malone Dies foi o segundo romance do que se convencionou chamar de trilogia de romances do pós-guerra de Samuel Beckett. O presente trabalho estuda como o narrador em primeira pessoa, Malone, cria, ao longo das mais de 120 páginas, um tipo de narrar diferente, recheado de incertezas com base na aporia e na memória em frangalhos, o que leva o leitor a um terreno pantanoso em que as antigas certezas do romance tradicional foram eliminadas. O objetivo desta dissertação está em explorar como a materialidade histórica tanto do período de produção do romance, a Segunda Guerra Mundial na França ocupada, quanto o da sua publicação, imediatamente após o encerramento do conflito, são pontos cruciais para esse novo tipo de narração desenvolvido por Samuel Beckett. Paralelamente, este projeto tenta dar a sua pequena contribuição ao movimento crítico de resgate empirista realizado por uma série de críticos beckettianos que, nos últimos anos, passaram a se focar na materialidade histórica da produção do romancista e enfrentar a ideia até então consensual de que Samuel Beckett era um autor a-histórico e focado apenas em questões metafísicas. / Malone Dies was published in 1956 in English, being the second novel of what became Samuel Becketts trilogy. This work aims to study how the first person narrator, Malone, is able to establish, in 120 pages, a different kind of narration, full of uncertainties based upon aporia and in his memory in shambles, which leads the reader to an unstable ground in which the old certainties of the traditional novel are eliminated. The main goal of this dissertation is to explore how the historical materiality of both the period of the novels writing, the Second World War in occupied France, and that of its publication, soon after the war ended, are crucial points to this new type of narration developed by Samuel Beckett. At the same time, this project attempts to make its small contribution to the empiricist trend developed by many Becketts scholars which, in the last years, have focused on the historical materiality of the novelists production to confront the hitherto consensual idea that Samuel Beckett was an ahistorical author, focused only in metaphysical issues.

Partindo do exame dos pressupostos do realismo formal no romance, a dissertação pretende demonstrar como a desconfiança do narrador beckettiano quanto aos fundamentos que sustentam a voz em primeira pessoa e a estrutura ficcional do romance, observada desde Molloy e Malone Morre, dá lugar ao exame dos fundamentos relacionados à constituição da própria noção de subjetividade e desdobra-se em reflexões de natureza linguística em O inominável. Momento em que a hipótese de que é na linguagem e pela linguagem que o homem se constitui como sujeito, formulada pelo linguista Émile Benveniste, será desenvolvida considerando a dimensão trágica da experiência do eu. Com efeito, parte da tarefa da desta dissertação consiste em demonstrar a pertinência do trágico em O inominável, com o propósito de aprofundar a discussão teórica sobre a narrativa do século XX. / From an examination of the formal assumptions realism in the novel, the dissertation aims to demonstrate how distrust of Becketts narrator at the grounds that support the voice in first person and the fictional structure of the novel, observed since Molloy and Malone Dies, giving rise to the investigation of the grounds related to the constitution of the notion of subjectivity and unfolds in linguistic nature reflections in The Unnamable. Moment when the hypothesis that it is in the language and by the language that humans is constituted as subject, formulated by the linguist Émile Benveniste, will be developed based on the tragic dimension of the experience of \"I\". Indeed, part of the task of this dissertation is to demonstrate the relevance of the tragic dimension in The Unnamable, in order to deepen the theoretical discussion of the twentieth centurys narrative.

Publicado em 1956 em inglês, Malone Dies foi o segundo romance do que se convencionou chamar de trilogia de romances do pós-guerra de Samuel Beckett. O presente trabalho estuda como o narrador em primeira pessoa, Malone, cria, ao longo das mais de 120 páginas, um tipo de narrar diferente, recheado de incertezas com base na aporia e na memória em frangalhos, o que leva o leitor a um terreno pantanoso em que as antigas certezas do romance tradicional foram eliminadas. O objetivo desta dissertação está em explorar como a materialidade histórica tanto do período de produção do romance, a Segunda Guerra Mundial na França ocupada, quanto o da sua publicação, imediatamente após o encerramento do conflito, são pontos cruciais para esse novo tipo de narração desenvolvido por Samuel Beckett. Paralelamente, este projeto tenta dar a sua pequena contribuição ao movimento crítico de resgate empirista realizado por uma série de críticos beckettianos que, nos últimos anos, passaram a se focar na materialidade histórica da produção do romancista e enfrentar a ideia até então consensual de que Samuel Beckett era um autor a-histórico e focado apenas em questões metafísicas. / Malone Dies was published in 1956 in English, being the second novel of what became Samuel Becketts trilogy. This work aims to study how the first person narrator, Malone, is able to establish, in 120 pages, a different kind of narration, full of uncertainties based upon aporia and in his memory in shambles, which leads the reader to an unstable ground in which the old certainties of the traditional novel are eliminated. The main goal of this dissertation is to explore how the historical materiality of both the period of the novels writing, the Second World War in occupied France, and that of its publication, soon after the war ended, are crucial points to this new type of narration developed by Samuel Beckett. At the same time, this project attempts to make its small contribution to the empiricist trend developed by many Becketts scholars which, in the last years, have focused on the historical materiality of the novelists production to confront the hitherto consensual idea that Samuel Beckett was an ahistorical author, focused only in metaphysical issues.

Cette thèse examine la pertinence d’une filiation beckettienne chez John Banville, et propose d’envisager les apparentes divergences d’écriture comme les manifestations d’une même affection mélancolique : en effet, l’économie beckettienne et la profusion banvillienne pourraient constituer deux produits d’une écriture placée sous le signe du double et du décalage. John Banville poursuit à sa manière le projet beckettien de l’esthétique de l’échec : il illustre, à l’instar de son devancier, l’impossibilité de concilier deux images contradictoires de la réalité, celle, idéale, d’une pensée conduite selon les règles de la science, et cette autre, proliférante, instable, de la matière même. Le principe selon lequel le double dégradé de l’idéal met en échec toute tentative d’ordonner les données du réel sous-tend et caractérise les œuvres de ces deux écrivains, que rassemble une même fascination pour la science et ses systèmes de pensée. Le fossé séparant idéal et contingence, ordonnancement de la pensée et chaos matériel, y abrite la source d’une écriture mélancolique. L’analyse du discours pseudo-scientifique, qui dans le même mouvement témoigne d’une volonté affichée d’apprivoiser le réel et révèle l’instabilité fondamentale de l’être et du langage, permet de mettre au jour une filiation mélancolique. C’est cette filiation que l’on peut suivre en observant les persistances visuelles et auditives, et plus largement la perpétuation du ressassement de la pensée spéculative : les images, voix et pensées de l’impuissance font perpétuellement retour au sein des œuvres, mais également d’une œuvre à l’autre, et de Beckett à Banville. / This thesis tries to uncover a literary filiation between Samuel Beckett and John Banville, with particular emphasis on Beckett’s Trilogy and John Banville’s scientific tetralogy. It proposes to consider their apparently diverging modes of writing as two manifestations of the same melancholy affection: the economy of means in Beckett and its profusion in Banville could be regarded as two modes of literary production characterized by discrepancy and error. John Banville follows the Beckettian project of an esthetics of failure – like his predecessor, he illustrates the impossibility of successfully combining two contradictory images of reality, one an ideal image driven by thought mechanisms modelled on scientific procedures, and the other, a buzzing, instable image of matter itself. The principle whereby the degraded double of the ideal necessarily defeats every attempt at ordering the data of reality underpins and defines the works of the two writers, displaying a fascination for science and systems of thought. In their fiction, the gap between ideal and contingency, between thought processes and material chaos, is the source of a melancholy inspiration. The analysis of pseudo-scientific discourse, which both testifies to a determination to gain control over chaotic reality and reveals the fundamental instability of being and language, allows us to uncover a link between the two writers, based on melancholy. This legacy can then be evidenced through the observation of the same visual and auditory perceptions, and more largely the perpetuation of boundless speculation: images, voices, and thoughts of impotence recur throughout the works, but also from one work to the next, and from Beckett to Banville.

Seine Biographie hielt der irische Dichter Samuel Beckett (1906 - 1989), Träger des Literatur-Nobelpreises 1969, zurückhaltend für wenig erwähnenswert. Deshalb konnten die Lücken nur mühsam geschlossen werden. ....