No description available.

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

No description available.

Thesis advisor: Joseph Nugent / In this paper, I unite scholarly understanding of T. S. Eliot’s recurring character, Sweeney. I present the origin of Sweeney through Eliot’s knowledge of classical and Irish myth as well as his contemporary views surrounding Ireland, Catholicism, Africa, and Afro-modernism. In discussing dramatic Sweeney, I incorporate an understanding of Eliot’s contemporary works on Senecan tragedy to unravel the fragmented nature of “Sweeney Agonistes.” I conclude my first chapter by discussing Sweeney’s “death” by analyzing Eliot’s recent conversion to Anglicanism and emerging views of poetic metaphysics. My second chapter unveils the ghost of Sweeney in Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral” through the metaphor of stencil art, discussing “Sweeney Agonistes” as an outline. Further, I find Sweeney’s ghost in the work of Samuel Beckett’s "Waiting For Godot" through analysis of themes drawn from an article by Rick De Villier, as well as new studies on technique and characters. I conclude with my explanation of Sweeney as a “new” Senecan Tragic Hero based on the terminology of semper idem - always the same. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. Morrissey School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English. / Discipline: Departmental Honors.

When the Irish writer Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) wrote Waiting for Godot in 1948-1949 he was in a state of artistic depression and confusion. He had already turned to French instead of English and with a manuscript for the stage he made an effort to get away from what he called ”the awful prose” he was working on at that time. Waiting for Godot had its first opening night in Paris in 1953, and during the years since then many different interpretations have been made of this challenging work of art. In this essay, with the meta textual elements in Waiting for Godot as a foundation, I’m reading the drama as a writer’s struggle with his material – not strictly biographical, but with Beckett as an artistic example. Vladimir and Estragon, as well as Pozzo and Lucky, then become personalizations of the voices in the mind of the author, where intellect/reason/analysis on one hand and intuition/feeling/fantasy on the other are working side by side, or as a pair of opposites, to try to get along through conflict and cooperation; conferring, clashing, and complementing one another. Godot will then function as the mystical and driving force, the necessary lack of purpose or fundamental meaning that keeps the artist in touch with art. In this aspect Godot has not to come; his absence is an absolute condition to get the play going, to keep the writer writing, to make all artists continue their lonely, tiresome, difficult work. Waiting for Godot tells us something about the struggle every writer has to face when writing a play, or a novel, or a poem, where he, or she, has to speak with and listen to the inner voices of intuition and intellect and try to get by in spite of the overall sense of hopelessness of it all. Art is at the same time without meaning and of infinite value and I believe that this paradox is alive and working in Waiting for Godot.

Dans ce mémoire de recherche-création en littératures de langue française, j’aborde la question des rapports entre les procédés de réécriture (par exemple, l’intertextualité, l’intratextualité et l’autotextualité, mais aussi les figures de la répétition et de la correction) et l’effet de défamiliarisation (ou de distanciation) au moyen d’un essai sur le roman Mercier et Camier de Samuel Beckett et d’une création littéraire de mon cru : un livre-objet constitué de trente et une feuilles non paginées et non reliées, sur lesquelles je réécris autant de fois l’incipit de Bouvard et Pécuchet, de Gustave Flaubert, en recourant à une mise en page qui défie le mode de lecture linéaire. Autant mon essai que ma création s’appliquent à montrer que les procédés de réécriture peuvent être employés pour produire un effet de défamiliarisation visant la fonction représentative de la littérature. / In this creative Master’s Thesis in French Literature, I addess the issue of the relationship between processes of rewriting (eg, intertextuality, intratextuality and autotextuality, but also the figures of repetition and correction) and defamiliarization (or the distancing effect) by the means of an essay on the novel Mercier et Camier by Samuel Beckett and of a literary creation of my own, consisting of thirty-one unbounded and unpaginated sheets, on which I rewrote as many times the incipit of Bouvard et Pecuchet by Gustave Flaubert in a layout that defies linear reading. Both my essay and my creation intend to show that processes of rewriting can be used to defamiliarize the representative function of literature.

Cette thèse s'attache à mettre en lumière une véritable continuité littéraire de Wilde à Beckett, tissée par une poétique de la présence qui maintient leurs oeuvres dans une permanente instabilité, aux frontières de l'ininterprétable, tout en soulignant les particularités des voies poétiques qu'ils empruntent. L'absence est une présence étrangement dense chez ces auteurs qui captent des persistances fantomatiques, interrogeant la possibilité de la représentation, de la perception et de l'altérité. Entre présence et absence, la mort est au coeur d'oeuvres qui réinventent l'héritage gothique pour exprimer l'horreur de la dégradation du moi, l'angoisse du devenir-Objet, processus de hantise qui conduit à deux esthétiques croisées de la décomposiiton. Le texte wildien est un jalon menant à la représentation beckettienne de la disparition des frontières entre vie et mort. la présence structure aussi sur le mode métatextuel : par la mise en abyme et la métathéâtralité, la représentation se fait fragmentaire pour montrer les failles d'une présence paradoxale au coeur d'un théâtre de la revenance. la suprématie de l'art sur le réel et du style sur la substance apparaissent : entre épuisement et emballement, leurs écritures sont caractérisées par la précision et la cohérence tout en décrivant le vacillement des certitudes et des conventions. De leur rapport ambivalent à l'Irlande naît un texte se déployant dans un "entre-Trois" linguistique (anglais, français, et gaélique). Les oeuvres permettent de faire l'expérience de la présence à la limite de la disparition, menant à une écriture de l'entre-Deux pour défaire les frontières, trouver des passages, inventer de nouvelles voies. / This thesis aims at highlighting a deep literary continuity from Wilde to Beckett, through a poetic of the presence which keeps their works in a permanent instability, verging on the impossibility of interpreting, while underlining the specificities of the poetic ways they undertake. The absence is a strangely dense presence in the works of those two writers who get ghostly remainings, questioning the possibility of representation, of perception and otherness. Between presence and absence, death is at the core of works which reinvent the gothic legacy to express which leads to two crossed aesthetics of decomposition. The Wildean text is a hinge leading to the Beckettian representation of the disappearance of the frontiers between life and death. The presence also structures on a metatextual mode : through mise en abyme and metatheatricality, the representation becomes fragmentary in order to show the weaknesses of a paradoxical presence at the heart of a spectral theatre. The supremacy of art over reality and of style over substance appear : between exhaustion and profusion, their writings are characterized by precision and consistency while describing the wavering of certainties and conventions. Their ambivalent relationship to Ireland brings forth a text existing in the intermediary space between English, French and Gaelic. Their works foster the experience of presence verging on disapppearence, leading to an in-Between writing to dismiss frontiers, to find new passages and invent new ways.

Dans ce mémoire de recherche-création en littératures de langue française, j’aborde la question des rapports entre les procédés de réécriture (par exemple, l’intertextualité, l’intratextualité et l’autotextualité, mais aussi les figures de la répétition et de la correction) et l’effet de défamiliarisation (ou de distanciation) au moyen d’un essai sur le roman Mercier et Camier de Samuel Beckett et d’une création littéraire de mon cru : un livre-objet constitué de trente et une feuilles non paginées et non reliées, sur lesquelles je réécris autant de fois l’incipit de Bouvard et Pécuchet, de Gustave Flaubert, en recourant à une mise en page qui défie le mode de lecture linéaire. Autant mon essai que ma création s’appliquent à montrer que les procédés de réécriture peuvent être employés pour produire un effet de défamiliarisation visant la fonction représentative de la littérature. / In this creative Master’s Thesis in French Literature, I addess the issue of the relationship between processes of rewriting (eg, intertextuality, intratextuality and autotextuality, but also the figures of repetition and correction) and defamiliarization (or the distancing effect) by the means of an essay on the novel Mercier et Camier by Samuel Beckett and of a literary creation of my own, consisting of thirty-one unbounded and unpaginated sheets, on which I rewrote as many times the incipit of Bouvard et Pecuchet by Gustave Flaubert in a layout that defies linear reading. Both my essay and my creation intend to show that processes of rewriting can be used to defamiliarize the representative function of literature.

[pt] Esta pesquisa investiga a contemporaneidade da obra do escritor irlandês Samuel Beckett. A investigação privilegia três eixos, em três ensaios que articulam aspectos historiográficos, filosóficos e cênicos. O primeiro ensaio pensa de que forma a poética do tempo em Beckett participa do debate atual sobre o contemporâneo. O segundo ensaio, voltado para a produção televisiva de Beckett e atentando em especial às leituras que dela fez Gilles Deleuze, reflete sobre a produção de um pensamento entre, sobre ecos e ressonâncias geradas por este encontro. Por fim, o terceiro ensaio explora a recepção norteamericana da obra de Beckett, a partir da criação cênica e performática desenvolvida em parcerias com o diretor Alan Schneider, nas montagens de Not I e Rockaby, e com grupo Mabou Mines/NY, nas adaptações dos textos não teatrais The lost ones, Company, e Worstward Ho. / [en] This research investigates the contemporary vigor of Samuel Beckett s work. It moves along three main paths, in three essays where historiographical, philosophical and scenic aspects are articulated. The first essay reflects on how Beckett s poetics of time participates in the current debate on the contemporary. The second, focusing on Beckett s plays for television and paying special attention to Gilles Deleuze s readings of it, reflects on the concept of thinking in between, on echoes and resonances generated by this powerful encounter. Finally, the third essay explores the North American reception of Beckett s work, attending to the scenic and performative creations developed in partnership with director Alan Schneider, in the productions of Not I and Rockaby, and with the Mabou Mines Group/NY, in their adaptions of The lost ones, Company, and Worstward Ho.

Le terme désœuvrement apparaît comme une des grandes notions qui peuplent la critique littéraire du 20ème siècle. Il marque la mise en mouvement de l'absence de l’œuvre dans laquelle l'écriture tend vers l'espace où rien ne peut être fait. La Trilogie romanesque de Beckett et les romans de Blanchot se croisent dans cet espace du désœuvrement. Les deux écrivains tentent de faire opérer la fin de la littérature en cherchant une nouvelle forme qui réalise le chaos. Dans leur œuvre, le temps, l'espace, la narration et le langage sont mis en redéfinition en abandonnant tous leurs caractères traditionnels. L’œuvre s'approche donc du fragmentaire. / The term worklessness became one of the main concepts in the literary criticism of the 20th century. It marked the absence of the work on the way to a literary space where nothing can be done. Both Beckett and Blanchot tried to put an end to literature by creating a new form that could express the chaos. In theirs novels, time, space, narration and language no longer remain their traditional characteristics. The works of the two authors are close to what we call fragmented novel.