No description available.

Through readings of selected works by Helene Cixous and Jacques Derrida, this thesis explores the paradoxical association of love and violence. Mv interest here is in psychological and linguistic, as well as physical violence.

This thesis explores the questions of impotence and making in Samuel Beckett's trilogy. Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, and How It Is. The male characters, though repeatedly declared to be impotent, somehow conceive, gestate and bear others who are in many ways like themselves.

This study examines a neglected group of French women intellectuals active in the aftermath of the May 1968 events: Benoite Groult, Francoise Parturier, Gisele Halimi, Francoise Giroud, Daniele Sallenave and Elisabeth Badinter. Despite their media profile and many public interventions, these women have not received the same level of attention as those associated with 'French feminism': Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray.

No description available.

No description available.

Beckett and the Institution of Literature investigates the evolution of Samuel Beckett's reputation over the latter half of the twentieth century, focussing on two questions: what are the institutional frameworks and operations that have effected Beckett's work, and what effect has the work had on the institution of literature? The first half of the thesis explores Beckett's relationships with his French publisher, Editions de Minuit, in the 1950s, and his English publisher, John Calder, in the 1960s. By situating Beckett in institutional and historical contexts, the thesis seeks to avoid the uncritical acceptance of Beckett's consecration that underlies so much scholarly writing on his work. Archival evidence reveals the process by which Beckett was circulated and promoted, first, to an elite avant-garde readership, and thence to a wider public, and challenges the popular conception of Beckett as utterly uninterested in publication and publicity matters. The latter half of the thesis considers the legal and promotional (particularly visual) frames of reference by which Beckett is often characterised today. It is suggested that conflicts over staging rights, and the widespread use of a uniform image of Beckett to promote his work, are instrumental both in determining and in jeopardising the work's current cultural status. The thesis argues that the relation between Beckett's work and the literary institutions that have produced it is mutually transformative, and that the work has consistently challenged, exceeded, and disrupted the institution of literature. It is proposed that there are, however, indications that the public is tiring of Beckett's now familiar classic works, and so the thesis asks why it has come about that in being canonised the work has also been domesticated, what this means for the way we have been reading Beckett's texts, and whether there is anything to be done about it.

No description available.

The Beckettian creature is a product of dehumanisation and endures a variety of irresolvable tensions which culminate in a contingent mode of being that subsists in the nostalgia or hope for an authentic, meaningful life. This thesis examines Samuel Beckett's evocation of the 'creature' as an ontological concept to make the case for the oblique historical and political significance of his artistic forms. My work traces the aesthetic, biopolitical and humanistic resonance of the creature to contribute new ways of analysing Beckett's 'art of failure' in the post-Holocaust context. Through close readings of Beckett's prose and drama, particularly texts from the middle period, including Mol/ay, Ma/one Dies, The Unnamab/e, Waiting/or Godot and Endgame, I explicate four arenas of creaturely life in Beckett. Each chapter attends to a particular theme - testimony, power, humour and survival- to analyse a range of pressures and impositions that precipitate the creaturely state of suspension. I draw on the philosophical and theoretical writings of Theodor Adomo, Giorgio Agamben, Waiter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida to relate Beckett's creatures to a framework of critical theory that addresses the human condition and the status of art in the second half of the twentieth century. The key findings of this thesis are that Beckett's creatures traverse the edge of a bare life devoid of meaning, but live on through the debased idea of the human as they negotiate pressing obligations and melancholic repetition compulsions. Beckett invents author-narrators and narrative modes replete with epistemological and expressive failures, which act as an appropriate aesthetic response and pertinent reflection of the destabilised human after the Holocaust. As such, Beckett conveys the anti-humanist vision that attends the perverse or ineffective performance of humanist assumptions.