Tracing the Material considers how James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy represent material spaces and objects as a way of engaging with the fraught histories of England and Ireland. I argue that these three writers use spaces and objects to think through and critique nineteenth and early twentieth-century conflicts and transitions, particularly in the areas of empire, nationalism, gender, and family. Writing in the 1920s and 1930s, in the decline of British ascendency, the rise of the Irish Free State, and between the World Wars, these writers seek to interpret their history through the material world as a way of articulating their political, cultural, and social dissatisfactions, and to imagine the future. Drawing in part from Walter Benjamin’s materialist historiography and Jacques Derrida’s texts on spectrality and mourning, I investigate how the material world becomes the means through which nations and individuals express their guilt and desires, mourn losses, cut their losses, articulate the present, and anticipate the future. A study of the material world in these novels thus yields insights into how literary texts respond to history, both overtly and implicitly, foregrounding the importance of physical spaces and things in the larger narratives of national and personal history. My dissertation offers a new understanding of the way twentieth-century literature navigates its history through materiality, destabilizes subject-object distinctions, and exposes the often-unexpected power of the non-human world.

As literary modernism was emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of its most important figures and precursors began to talk about their own writing as a kind of starvation. My doctoral thesis considers the reasons for and development of this previously little-explored trope, arguing that hunger becomes a focal point for modernism’s complex relationship to aesthetic autonomy. I identify a specific tradition of writers, beginning in the nineteenth century with proto-modernists such as Melville and Rimbaud, flourishing in the pivotal figures of Knut Hamsun, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, and expiring with modernist-influenced contemporary writers such as Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee. Although these writers are avid readers and devoted disciples of one another, mine is the first study to read them alongside one another as a coherent literary tradition. Reading them in this way, I am able to trace the development of the ‘art of hunger’ as a locus for a crisis in aesthetic autonomy that spans the twentieth century. I develop this line of argument in two phases. In the first, I trace the emergence of an art of hunger out of modernist engagements with philosophical aesthetics and its notions of aesthetic autonomy. Readings of the “art of hunger” in Herman Melville, Arthur Rimbaud, Knut Hamsun, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett’s post-war work reveal that starvation carries autonomy to an extreme and hyper-literal endpoint, revealing both its desirability as an aesthetic ideal and the impossibility of art’s complete autonomy from the body, the market or the social dimensions of language. In the second phase, I consider how this trope has animated later twentieth-century engagements with modernism. For authors writing in the aftermath of modernism, hunger provides a way of considering new complications to aesthetic autonomy in the light of both their debt to modernism and their specific historical circumstances. In this light, I consider three different extensions of the modernist art of hunger: its absorption into high formalism in Beckett’s late prose; its collapse in the face of an emerging concern with the social in Paul Auster; and its transformation into an ethical aesthetics of food taboos, restriction and asceticism in J. M. Coetzee.

This thesis analyses the responses of Irish writers and painters to a phase of national self-assertion that had arguably lost its liberating potential. It shows how the exhaustion of revolutionary pressures in Ireland after independence complicates the ties between creative activity and political activism. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship within political theory, literary criticism and art history, I chart an emerging network of literary and artistic techniques that confronts the representational aesthetics of the nation with strategies of paradox, reversal and renewal. My readings of the work of Denis Devlin, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Mainie Jellett, Jack Butler Yeats and, in particular, Thomas McGreevy, provide a means by which to distinguish other cultural possibilities that were imagined and pursued from 1922 to 1941, including McGreevy’s own aspiration to remould 'A Cultural Irish Republic'. The thesis argues that Ireland's political and artistic avant-garde were forcibly divided during this period: two factions that had been split apart by the effects of civil war and censorship. As such it will be preoccupied with a central question: how to sustain cultural strategies of revolutionary significance when the frontier between creative activity and political activism can no longer be straightforwardly crossed.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T18:23:08Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Felipe Augusto de Souza Santos.pdf: 1601405 bytes, checksum: 5aceb79107bef912ae3c37583b50be9c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-09-04 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / This research aims to investigate issues of theatrical aesthetics and the process of creation of Samuel Beckett, from a study on aspects of his work as a playwright and director of his own plays. First it will be made an approach about the relationship between text and scene in Beckett s work, that is, we will make a survey of the major aesthetic and structural features of plays such as Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy days and Footfalls, in order to problematize some of major issues involving the dramaturgy of Beckett, and also a study of the trajectory of Beckett from playwright to director. Later, we will make an analysis of the dramaturgical text of Krapp s last tape, using concepts from the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin and the Circle, such as dialogism, polyphony and chronotope, and also a reflection on the various performances of Krapp s last tape directed by Beckett. For this, we will use an unpublished translation of Krapp s last tape held by the researcher and published in this work as well as Beckett s directing notebook, with notes of the staging process of his version of Krapp s last tape performed at the Schiller-Theater in Berlin in 1969, and the changes undergone by the dramatic text. The results suggest the importance of the staging process performed by Beckett on some of his major plays, particularly Krapp s last tape, as a revising and defining element of his dramaturgy / Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo investigar questões ligadas à estética teatral e ao processo de criação de Samuel Beckett, a partir de um estudo relativo a aspectos de seu trabalho como dramaturgo e encenador de suas próprias peças. Primeiramente será realizada uma abordagem acerca da relação entre texto e cena na obra de Beckett, ou seja, faremos um levantamento das principais características estéticas e estruturais de peças como Esperando Godot, Fim de partida, Dias felizes e Passos, no intuito de problematizarmos algumas das principais questões envolvendo a dramaturgia de Beckett, e também um estudo acerca da trajetória de Beckett de dramaturgo a encenador. Posteriormente, faremos uma análise do texto dramatúrgico de A última gravação de Krapp, utilizando conceitos provenientes dos escritos de Mikhail Bakhtin e do Círculo, tais como dialogismo, polifonia e cronotopo, e também uma reflexão sobre as diversas encenações de A última gravação de Krapp dirigidas por Beckett. Para tanto, serão utilizados uma tradução inédita de A última gravação de Krapp realizada pelo pesquisador e publicada neste trabalho, bem como o caderno de direção de Beckett, contendo as anotações do processo de encenação de sua montagem de A última gravação de Krapp no Schiller-Theater de Berlim, em 1969, e as alterações sofridas pelo texto dramatúrgico. Os resultados obtidos apontam para a importância do processo de encenação realizado por Beckett em relação a algumas de suas principais peças, em especial A última gravação de Krapp, como elemento revisor e definidor de sua dramaturgia

Samuel Beckett penned novels, short stories, poetry, stage plays, radio plays, and scripts—and he did each in a way that blended genre, challenged the norms of creative writing, and surprised audiences around the globe. His experimental approach to creative writing included the use of absurdism, genre-hybridization, and ergodicism, which led to Beckett fundamentally changing the approach to creative writing. His aesthetics have trickled down through the years and can be seen in contemporary works, including Aimee Bender’s short story collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves[1]. By examining these works in comparison to Beckett, this project hopes to illuminate the effects of Beckett’s experimentation in form and genre on contemporary creative writing. [1] The word ‘house’ appears in blue to honor Danielewski’s decision to have the word printed in that color each time it appears in his novel.

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“Resonant Texts” draws from literary criticism, history, biography, media theory, and the history of technology to examine representations of sound and acts of listening in modern experimental fiction and drama. I argue that sound recording technology, invented in the late 19th century, equipped 20th century authors including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, and Samuel Beckett with new resources for depicting human consciousness and experience. The works in my study feature what I call “close listening,” a technique initially made possible by the phonograph, which forced listeners to focus exclusively on what they heard without the presence of an accompanying image. My study examines the literary modernists’ acute attention to the auditory in their goal to accurately represent the reality of the subjective, perceiving self in increasingly urban, technologically advanced environments.

À partir d’un dispositif théorique et méthodologique emprunté au structuralisme figuratif de Gilbert Durand, ce mémoire propose une exploration du Mythe de la Fin du Monde dans quelques unes de ses manifestations romanesques et théâtrales. Les postulats de base qui fondent notre démarche sont au nombre de trois : a) l’œuvre littéraire possède toujours un substrat mythique ; b) un mythe représente un noyau de mythèmes, dont le trait définitoire est la redondance ; c) il n’y a pas de version privilégiée ou primitive du mythe, qui doit être vu comme une constante de l’esprit humain. Au niveau des applications pratiques, notre travail s’articule en deux démarches complémentaires, reprises d’une section à l’autre. Dans un premier temps, en nous appuyant sur le corpus romanesque – où le mythe nous semble abondant et complet – nous identifions les redondances internes et génériques que nous qualifions de «mythèmes». Dans un second temps, nous vérifions la présence et le fonctionnement de ces mythèmes dans le corpus dramatique. / Within the theoretical and methodological framework of the figurative structuralism devised by Gilbert Durand, this work sets out to explore the Myth of the End of the World based on two corpora: five novels and two plays. Three main postulates underlie our research: a) the literary work is always based on a mythical substratum; b) myth is an aggregation of mythemes, whose defining characteristic consists in their redundancy; c) myth is a constant of the human spirit and therefore none of its versions takes precedence over another. As far as the applications of the theory are concerned, our work is articulated in two distinct phases, repeated form one section to another. Based on the body of novels, where the myth manifests itself in its most complete and abundant form, phase 1 is devoted to the identification of redundancies, both internal to each work and generic, that are categorized as mythemes. Phase 2 verifies their presence in the body of plays.

IN ENGLISH The primary concern of this thesis is to explore the instances of incorporation of media-specific elements extracted and translated from radio and cinema into Samuel Beckett's late prose. The analysis of the texts forming Beckett's Nohow On trilogy is based on the investigation of the two modes of perception - the aural and the visual - and is realised through the close reading of Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Wostward Ho in the context of media and film theory and practice. The chief premise is that the formal translations among the print and non-print media in Beckett's work are conditioned by the author's interest in, and theoretical and practical familiarity with, radio, television, and cinematography. The discussion is thus supported by biographical and bibliographical framework, and Beckett's familiarity with the specificities of broadcast media and cinema is considered in their direct relation to the progressive 'technologisation' of his fiction of the 1980s. The thesis outlines the origins and transformations of the motif of voice as one of Beckett's chief fictional concerns, and explores the texts' practical and notional borrowings from the field of cinematography to elucidate the way in which they are designed to simulate perceptual experiences. In doing so, the individual...

À partir d’un dispositif théorique et méthodologique emprunté au structuralisme figuratif de Gilbert Durand, ce mémoire propose une exploration du Mythe de la Fin du Monde dans quelques unes de ses manifestations romanesques et théâtrales. Les postulats de base qui fondent notre démarche sont au nombre de trois : a) l’œuvre littéraire possède toujours un substrat mythique ; b) un mythe représente un noyau de mythèmes, dont le trait définitoire est la redondance ; c) il n’y a pas de version privilégiée ou primitive du mythe, qui doit être vu comme une constante de l’esprit humain. Au niveau des applications pratiques, notre travail s’articule en deux démarches complémentaires, reprises d’une section à l’autre. Dans un premier temps, en nous appuyant sur le corpus romanesque – où le mythe nous semble abondant et complet – nous identifions les redondances internes et génériques que nous qualifions de «mythèmes». Dans un second temps, nous vérifions la présence et le fonctionnement de ces mythèmes dans le corpus dramatique. / Within the theoretical and methodological framework of the figurative structuralism devised by Gilbert Durand, this work sets out to explore the Myth of the End of the World based on two corpora: five novels and two plays. Three main postulates underlie our research: a) the literary work is always based on a mythical substratum; b) myth is an aggregation of mythemes, whose defining characteristic consists in their redundancy; c) myth is a constant of the human spirit and therefore none of its versions takes precedence over another. As far as the applications of the theory are concerned, our work is articulated in two distinct phases, repeated form one section to another. Based on the body of novels, where the myth manifests itself in its most complete and abundant form, phase 1 is devoted to the identification of redundancies, both internal to each work and generic, that are categorized as mythemes. Phase 2 verifies their presence in the body of plays.