Thesis advisor: Marjorie Howes / Thesis advisor: Andrew Von Hendy / By representing the relationship between a subject and a particular object, key modernist writers offered paradigms for conceiving their literary aesthetics more explicitly. <italic>A World of Objects</italic> presents three interconnected narratives about literary making in the twentieth century by pairing James Joyce with the hoarded object, Elizabeth Bowen with the toy, and Samuel Beckett with the forsaken thing. The over-arching aim of this study is to prove the logic of these pairings by contextualizing the object within each writer's work. In addition to offering detailed analyses of specific texts by Joyce, Bowen, and Beckett, I explore the ways that their work participated in larger aesthetic movements made up of fellow writers, visual artists, cultural theorists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers. Focused on the objects that dangerously clutter Shem's inkbottle house in <italic>Finnegans Wake</italic>, my first chapter reopens critical questions about modernism's stylistic engagement with waste, obsessive cataloguing, and projects of indefinite scope. By integrating recent case histories and psychological discourse on compulsive hoarding, I probe both Joyce's increasing interest in the excesses of the object world and its effects upon his readers. Hoarders and critics of the Wake are alike prone to anxieties concerning the potential value of acquired items. These anxieties lead to an extreme tendency that psychological researchers and clinicians refer to as "elaborative processing." Whether encountering a piece of trash, like a pack of used matches, or an obscure signifier, like "fallen lucifers," (an item in Shem's house) both the hoarder and the Joycean create cognitively rich associative networks for accumulated material or linguistic objects. Through an understanding of the phenomenon of hoarding, I offer an analysis of Joycean objects that assumes their potential value within a range of deferrable symbolic registers. Such a reading calls for a reconsideration of Joyce's later aesthetics and a critique of the critico-stylistic techniques peculiar to <italic>Wake</italic> scholarship. I go on to argue that the consequences of Joyce's equation of litter with literature extend well beyond <italic>Finnegans Wake</italic>; and that a large number of modernist texts exhibit the same potential for the discovery of value in the seemingly valueless. Bowen's theories on toys and character--presented in a series of essays, memoirs, radio broadcasts, and novels, particularly <italic>The House in Paris</italic>--provide a rich resource for considering the object of play in twentieth-century literary aesthetics. Bowen had a life-long obsession with toys ranging from Edwardian toy-theaters to Japanese dolls to Czechoslovakian marionettes. In the unpublished essay "Toys," she argues that the highest form of play involves resourceful manipulation, or the faculty to turn a found object into something else. Bowen's resourceful toy, like the hoarded object, relies upon an individual's heightened creative tendency to invent infinite uses (or misuses) for things. This chapter employs Bowen's theory by reemphasizing trope's etymological meaning of "to alter or to turn one thing into another." This method of encountering the phenomenal world can be discovered in a strain of twentieth-century writers who share Bowen's preoccupation with the effects of troping subjects with objects. Bowen was attracted to the toy because of its abilities to create tensions between subject and object distinctions; its mimetic potential to contest, invert, or reflect established ontological assumptions; and its capability to underscore the inter-construction of interiority and exteriority. My project's culminating chapter appropriates the phrase "forsaken things" from <italic>Malone Dies</italic> as a term to signify the recurrent, infraordinary objects that litter Beckett's texts and the daunting critical trajectories necessary to understand his aesthetic projects. Predominantly critics have abandoned Beckett's objects as either bereft of symbolic value or confoundedly too symbolic. My approach counters these readings by accepting the object's status as purposely forsaken, or liberated from confining ideological and aesthetic frames of judgment. Beckett uses objects to bait his audience into accepting tempting, cogent interpretations (whether allegorical, existential, psychoanalytic, autobiographical, or another); however, his technique is to undercut any stable reading by endowing the object with a paradoxically determined indeterminacy. I develop this argument by tracing the ways that a series of objects (spent matches, pebbles, "pointless" pencils) purposely fail to exhibit or contribute to a consistent syntax of meaning across Beckett's novels and short stories. I conclude my chapter by looking at Beckett's first completed play, <italic>Eleutheria</italic>, and a series of short stories that he wrote between 1946-47. Though one associates Beckett with the absence of objects, analysis of these texts proves that like his contemporaries, he, too, was dependent upon them. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

This dissertation examines a twentieth-century lineage of writers and poets concerned with signatory inscription. By this, I mean the writing, tracing, branding, embossing, tattooing, or engraving of the name of a person or place onto various kinds of surfaces, as well as other forms of marking that approximate autography. My contention is that James Joyce's novels demonstrate an explicit, underexplored concern with signature and the different imaginary investments (erotic, legal, preservative) that accompany its presence in the world. In Joyce's wake, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney, and Don DeLillo all produce texts that both engage with Joyce's novels and think carefully about the potential of the signature as a material object. My first chapter, 'James Joyce's Signatures', explores how nineteenth-century developments in graphology and forensic identification inherit ideas from the medicinal doctrine of signatures. I argue that this expanded sense of signature offers a unique perspective on Joyce's taxonomic representation, which questions the boundaries between a body of text and (non)human bodies. The presence of legal trials in Ulysses adds a forensic element to Joyce's signatory imagination. This element is taken to its logical extreme in 'Nausicaa', where scents, sounds, and impressions become bodily, as opposed to alphabetical, signatures - produced by humans, waves, and stones. The second chapter, 'Samuel Beckett and the Endurance of Names', continues this line of argument, showing how Beckett inherits Joyce's interest in autographic inscription, but employs it for different ends. While the epitaphic tradition relies upon hard materials such as stone and metal to preserve lettering, Beckett's interest in excrement ('First Love') and mud (How It Is) remaps inscription onto immanence. Rather than seeking immortality through lithic preservation, Beckett's characters yearn to 'return to the mineral state', to have their bodies subsumed and dispersed throughout a greater container. The third chapter, 'Seamus Heaney and the Phonetics of Place', turns from the signature of persons to the signature of places, from prose to poetry. Explicitly glossing poems like 'Anahorish', 'Toome', and 'Broagh' as inspired by Stephen Dedalus, Heaney performs a critical repatriation of Joyce's work. Joyce uses fictional, motivated relations between names and referents to construct a linguistic correlative for Stephen's youthful naivety - a technique that personalises his lexicon, privileging Stephen's own associations over those of nationality, language, or religion. Heaney, on the other hand, politicises this process, utilising phonetic association to forge imaginary correspondences between Irish place-names and the people and places they denote. The final chapter, 'Don DeLillo, Encryption, and Writing Technologies', examines the novels of Don DeLillo and his interest in signatory technologies. Drawing upon archival research conducted on the manuscripts of Americana, Ratner's Star and The Names, I show that Joyce influenced the composition of these texts to a greater extent than previously thought. In particular, DeLillo uses Joyce to think through the technological dimensions of writing, comparing older methods of inscription like boustrophedon to modern communication technologies via Ulysses.

Submitted by Marlene Santos (marlene.bc.ufg@gmail.com) on 2016-03-03T19:23:56Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação - Adriel Diniz dos Reis - 2015.pdf: 2537313 bytes, checksum: 84c3106818ae1ac823337eedcd29ebd5 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2016-03-04T11:01:48Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação - Adriel Diniz dos Reis - 2015.pdf: 2537313 bytes, checksum: 84c3106818ae1ac823337eedcd29ebd5 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-04T11:01:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação - Adriel Diniz dos Reis - 2015.pdf: 2537313 bytes, checksum: 84c3106818ae1ac823337eedcd29ebd5 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-08-20 / The purpose of this communication is to present and analyze the representation of theatrical performance Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, promoted by Máskara – Núcleo Transdisciplinar de Pesquisa em Teatro, Dança e Performance, from Escola de Música e Artes Cênicas (EMAC), Universidade Federal de Goiás (UFG) in 2005. This examination is based on the concept of performative time drawn from the analysis of prospects that blend the study of performances of Richard Schechner and Victor Turner, with time trials established in studies and reflections of Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust, Reinhart Kosellec and Paul Ricoeur, in conjunction with the practical discussions emerged in the production of Beckett presentation, as well as the dialectic of the human condition and time established by Beckett in that piece. Performers, time and human nature dialogues, construction, perception and representation of theatrical production are made. All these actions will be closely articulated in the development of this research in order to understand and explain this process, and as such proposals reflections approximate the studies inherent Cultural Performances, the work of the Máskara and reflections and concepts proposed by playwright in the theatrical text Waiting for Godot. / O objetivo da presente comunicação é apresentar e analisar a representação do espetáculo teatral Esperando Godot, de Samuel Beckett, promovido pelo Máskara – Núcleo Transdisciplinar de Pesquisa em Teatro, Dança e Performance, da Escola de Música e Artes Cênicas (EMAC), da Universidade Federal de Goiás (UFG), no ano de 2005. Este exame parte do conceito de Tempo Performático elaborado a partir das análises de perspectivas que mesclam os estudos das performances de Richard Schechner e Victor Turner, com os ensaios temporais estabelecidos nos estudos e reflexões de Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust, Reinhart Kosellec e Paul Ricoeur, em conjunto com as práticas discussões emergidas na produção do espetáculo beckettiano, assim como da dialética da condição humana e temporal estabelecida por Beckett na referida peça. São constituídos diálogos performáticos, temporais e de natureza humana, na construção, percepção e representação dessa montagem teatral. Todas essas ações serão minuciosamente articuladas no desenvolvimento dessa pesquisa, com o intuito de entender e explanar esse processo, e, como essas reflexões propostas aproximam-se dos estudos inerentes às Performances Culturais, do trabalho desenvolvido pelo Máskara e das reflexões e conceitos proposto pelo dramaturgo no texto teatral Esperando Godot.

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Presentation in panel, Samuel Beckett’s Dystopias.

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