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This thesis carries out an analysis of the plays by Samuel Beckett, Endgame and Happy Days. It achieves this by exploring how the playwright&rsquo / s characterization, setting and use of language in these plays display his tendency to employ some existentialist concepts such as despair, anxiety and thrownness on the way to authenticity. This study argues that there are some similarities between Beckett&rsquo / s two plays and Existentialism, and some characters in both plays display the existentialist man who is looking for becoming an authentic man. In other words, although there are some differences, these plays show that Samuel Beckett&rsquo / s view of Existentialism is quite similar to the Sartrean view.

Edward Albee is influenced by the Absurd Drama of Samuel Beckett whose works involve existential concerns. Albee follows Beckett&rsquo / s traces in the dramatization of uncertainty, alienation and the question of freedom. Albee&rsquo / s characters do not have fixed identities, and they suffer from their identity problems. The notion of Other enhances this uncertainty. The ambiguity of existence, whether they really are or not, presents another problem for these characters. Their lives are based on illusions, and the line between the reality and fantasy is absent. Alienation of the human being from the self and the others is another existential theme that Albee deals with. Alienation is partly caused by lack of communication, and as a result, the isolated self is entrapped in his own condition. Freedom becomes a confusing question in his works as it makes the characters anxious while choosing one option among various others on his own, and as it renders the characters responsible for their free choices. So, the characters tend to be passive agents in life, which is in fact another choice. Albee extends Beckett&rsquo / s absurdist ideas and adopts the Absurd Drama to highlight his social concerns as he is also a social critic. The targets of his criticism are materialism, loss of values and broken human relationships. The playwright challenges the audience for a reform on these points.

Univ., Diss.--Frankfurt am Main, 2006.

Texte remanié de: Mémoire de maîtrise--Paris 10. / Bibliogr. p. 137-142.

Samuel Beckett’s skepticism regarding language’s ability to communicate effectively drives his dramas’ use of formal and stylistic gestures that emphasize the musical potential of words. In this report, I analyze Beckett’s play Endgame (1958) in light of its musical elements and their implications for performance. Critics have debated the putative presence of sonata form, a type of musical structure prevalent among classical pieces from the eighteenth century, in Endgame. Emmanuel Jacquart proposes that the play follows such a form, while Thomas Mansell and Catherine Laws doubt the possibility of such interdisciplinarity. Mansell wonders whether the ascription of sonata form to Endgame’s structure merely couches dramatic fundamentals in musical terms, while Laws argues that the lack of harmonic structure in human speech prevents a spoken medium like drama from fully absorbing the formal conventions of classical music. I explore the uncharted territory between these two critical camps, linking the implications of Jacquart’s position for the performance of Endgame, as well as Mansell’s and Laws’s reiterations of the fundamental separation of language and music, to Beckett’s own preoccupation with the inability of language to express thought and emotion adequately. Ultimately, I contend that Endgame functions not simply as a sonata, but as a frustrated sonata; that is, it approximates sonata form but can never fully replicate it. As such, Endgame becomes a point of origin for Beckett’s more experimental later plays, a concept I illustrate by demonstrating how Play (1963), the work commonly regarded as the turning point between Beckett’s early and late dramatic styles, essentially revisits and refines the frustrated sonata. / text

"Impossible Voices: Phenomenologies of Sound in Beckett" is the first sustained exploration of sound in the prose and drama of Samuel Beckett. Bringing the field of sound studies to bear on Beckett's works, this dissertation argues that Beckett's treatment of inner speech--the sounds and voices in the "mind's ear"--is implicated in an aesthetics not only of failure, but of impossibility. The "impossible voices" of the dissertation's title are the "dead voices" or "human murmurs" of Beckett's purgatorial soundscapes. These sounds, qua manifestations of inner speech, cannot be fully exteriorized. This unbridgeable gap between inner speech and sounded speech within the self finds it analogue in a breakdown of communication between self and other, as shown in the three major plays: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days. Where conversation in these purgatorial worlds often asserts or provides mere presence, meaning is found by apophatic means such as noise, catachresis, and the ineffable. The organization of the chapters of this dissertation indicates a move from embodied voices--speaker and listener in two separate, functioning bodies--to a dynamic in which a disembodied voice speaks to a body in a "listening posture." The listener's vocal expression, moreover--if it exists--is secondary to that of the voice. This study thus makes a case for the importance of sound in the Beckett canon, using phenomenological readings to show that the impossible in Beckett is bound up with sound. / Romance Languages and Literatures

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.