Critical essay. Soon after the end of the Second World War, Samuel Beckett began producing French and English versions of each of his works. This raises interesting questions concerning the relationship between two languages and two texts within one literary work. Bilingualism is an essential dimension of Beckett's "oeuvre" which pushes the very limits of literature and explores essential aspects of language, identity and creation. / Creative writing. I was born in Montreal of a French mother and a father from Texas. My work in creative writing consists of six short stories set between the three geographical poles of my existence: Quebec, the United States and France. I also wrote a French and English version of my short story entitled The Ghost of Old Man Beck. These stories explore, on a more personal and creative level, the questions of bilingualism, identity and creativity raised in my critical essay.

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By fusing many of the established hypotheses on the source of the grotesque in Irish literature, this study establishes that these writers' impatience with all boundaries and limitations, physical or mental, led them to exploit the indeterminacy of the grotesque to achieve their particular aesthetic and epistemological objectives. / After an initial chapter on the relevant theoretical and national considerations, the prodigious cloacal visions of Beckett and Joyce are compared, with emphasis on their use of the grotesque to demythologize the creative process. A fourth chapter compares O'Brien's and Beckett's exploitation of the grotesque to undermine hegemonic philosophical and epistemological systems. / Like most writers of the grotesque tradition, Joyce and O'Brien assume a degree of moral responsibility by affirming, explicitly or implicitly, some traditional or utopian values and standards, while Beckett's deliberations on the complex relationship between Nature, the mind and the body end in negation, impotence and the hope of silence.

This dissertation offers both a theoretical investigation into the relationships between narrative, knowledge and personhood and a literary critical analysis of a group of Samuel Beckett's works in which narrative, knowledge and personhood are the central themes. / I present an account of the notion of narrative and explore the nature of justified narrative assertions. I then turn to skeptical and anti-realist arguments about the ability of narratives to represent truthfully the world. Such arguments are widespread in postmodernist and poststructuralist circles, and in order to evaluate them, I consider particular arguments of Jean-Francois Lyotard, Christopher Norris and Hayden White, all of whom question the ability of narratives to be true. The positions of these theorists rely upon deep conceptual confusion, and, after sorting out their claims, I conclude that they offer no compelling reasons to doubt that narratives can accurately and truthfully represent the world. / Next, I offer an analysis of the relationship between the notion of personhood and narrative. I argue against postmodernist and poststructuralist critiques of subjectivity, and, drawing on the work of various contemporary philosophers, I defend notions of subjectivity and selfhood while acknowledging and examining the essentially narrative nature of such phenomena. The concept of a "personal history" receives detailed analysis, as does the notion of a "situated self." While agreeing with particular criticisms of what is often called the "modern self," I argue that there are specific normative projects of modernity, namely autonomy and self-realization, that are worth preserving. / Finally, I explore the themes of narrative, knowledge and personhood in the nouvelles of Samuel Beckett. These works represent crises of narrative and personhood, and they depict the epistemic and ethical difficulties encountered by persons under conditions of modernity, conditions in which individual lives often lack narrative unity and meaning. I read Beckett as a critic of culture whose work, while deeply critical of certain trends in modern culture, points to the need for individual subjects to find true and meaningful narratives in which they can participate as co-authors.

Proefschrift Universiteit van Amsterdam. / Met index, lit. opg. - Met samenvatting in het Nederlands.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington. / Bibliography: l. 150-153.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 1974.

Frankfurt (Main), Univ., Diss., 2009

Issued also as theisis, Bonn. / Bibliography: p. 280-291.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 64-66).