Nous posons comme hypothèse de départ que, chez Beckett, une réponse aux questions posées par le problème du temps s'élabore à travers l'énonciation. Ce fonctionnement particulier apparaît dès les premiers textes beckettiens, mais sera étudié plus précisément à travers les Textes pour rien datant de 1950. Le premier chapitre propose une présentation des différentes caractéristiques propres aux Textes pour rien en rapport avec l'expérience du temps telle que l'écriture de Beckett en témoigne. Nous lirons en parallèle les Confessions de saint Augustin afin de voir de quelle façon Beckett a repris la question dans la poétique de son oeuvre. Dans le second chapitre, le statut du langage, tel que la psychanalyse le révèle et tel qu'il est pris en charge par le linguiste Émile Benveniste, permettra de voir comment le sujet se met en scène dans les modalités de sa parole. Chez Beckett en général et dans les Textes pour rien en particulier, certaines figures du temps, celles de l'attente, de la nostalgie, de l'habitude, du ressassement et de la fin participent à la constitution d'un présent en cours qui détermine à la fois la forme et le sens de l'oeuvre. Cette question du temps étant liée par sa nature même à celle de la mémoire, nous revenons dans le troisième chapitre à Augustin pour décrire la voix des Textes pour rien en ce qu'elle est tributaire d'une logique singulière de la mémoire (individuelle, intertextuelle et autotextuelle). En fait, la « mauvaise mémoire » des personnages, associée à un intertexte évident même s'il n'est pas toujours clairement identifiable, fonctionne de telle sorte que toute l'activité mémorielle servant au rappel de souvenirs et d'un héritage culturel commun devient la matière même du texte, par le travail d'une mémoire immanente au texte. Nous verrons alors que, chez Beckett, l'énonciation fait partie de l'expérience du temps plutôt qu'elle sert à la décrire et que, renonçant au temps physique ou chronologique, les Textes pour rien mettent en acte une temporalité qui n'est pas tant subjective que révélatrice d'une certaine forme de sujet. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Beckett, Textes pour rien, Temps, Mémoire, Figure, Énonciation.

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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.

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