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Dans l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett, les personnages féminins qui au début sont quasi absents, prennent de plus en plus d’importance et présentent alors différentes images féminines. L’univers féminin qui apparaît ne cesse de prendre de l’ampleur. Pour aborder le fait féminin, il faut prendre en compte les différents langages esthétiques spécifiques des personnages-femmes. En effet, ces langages - faits de diverses tournures imagées -, mettent en exergue l’identité féminine de ces personnages. Ces langages recouvrent de nombreux domaines : corporel, gestuel, scénique et pictural. Cette recherche permet de mieux comprendre le traitement du féminin dans l’œuvre dramatique de Samuel Beckett et de souligner les aspects majeurs des personnages féminins. / In Samuel Beckett’s works the female characters are seen to be absent at the beginning, but throughout the story their presence becomes more significant, and represents the different images of the female characters.The female characters in his work expand and grow constantly.To understand the female characters, we need to analyze the languages that have been used by each character. The languages provide a different image which highlights the identity of each character. They also cover many areas such as body, gestural, scenic, and pictorial. This research paper helps us to better understand how Samuel Beckett deals with feminine in his works, and highlights the major features of the female characters.

This thesis takes up the question of intertextuality between the Bible and Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre. It starts with the contention that this relationship has acquired something of the status of a commonplace within Beckett studies; not that substantial scholarly works have not widened out considerably the way that this is understood, but in Ruby Cohn’s words: ‘today every Beckett student knows his literary allegiances—the Bible and Dante, above all’. The Bible’s status for Beckett comes to be treated as a matter of common sense. In response to this critical situation, one aspect of the thesis is to disclose and analyse previously overlooked examples of the Bible’s presence in Beckett’s work, engaging with hitherto occluded parts of the oeuvre (unpublished manuscript texts and the French works, for example). But at the same time, it looks to critically question what is at stake in the claim that the Bible is a matter of common knowledge for Beckett. The methodology put to work in the thesis always begins in close readings of Beckett’s texts, and also of the discourses surrounding his oeuvre. In doing so, it resists an idea that close reading entails a retreat into an ahistorical formalism; rather, it argues for an historicism that does not simply rest on broad notions of orthodoxy and shared values. Rather than taking for granted a common sense idea of what the Bible is (even in the limited sense of what it is for Beckett), the thesis argues for its instability as a ‘text’ across more than one language. Nor, I argue, does Beckett’s oeuvre fix down a particular, single notion of the Bible as the relevant one for its own purposes (the King James Bible, for instance); on the contrary, his work is deeply engaged with the Bible in all its complex, multilingual textuality. The thesis contends that the particular relationship between Beckett and the Bible poses distinctive problems for the kinds of epistemological value invested in a certain understanding of intertextuality; indeed, I look throughout to interrogate the authority invested in familiarity—both that of the author and that of the critic. Following this thread, the thesis also undertakes a sustained engagement with the way in which archival materials are used and valued by a critical practice interested in questions of intertextuality. Through this, I look to do two things at once: both to respond to the extraordinary value of archival documentation for opening up new possibilities within Beckett studies, and at the same time to analyse closely the extents and limitations of what can be claimed on the basis of such analyses. In working through these kinds of question, and responding to the particular exigencies produced by the Bible in relation to the Beckett oeuvre, I also engage with critical issues having to do with theories of affect, the notion of style (asking what it means to adduce some piece of text as ‘biblical’ or ‘Beckettian’), and the analysis of intertextuality in performance. Through all of these readings, the thesis is interested in what it means to read intertextuality in relation to a Beckett ‘oeuvre’, when the ambit of that oeuvre, its internal interrelationships and its points of connection with the world, constantly shift and reformulate themselves. Rather than treating the Bible as a thread that can be safely followed from one end of the oeuvre to the other, guaranteeing a continuity that remains free from the complexities, irruptions and discontinuities performed in Beckett’s texts, the thesis argues that biblical intertextuality is actively involved in those complex Beckettian movements.

This thesis focuses on three plays written by Samuel Beckett: Play, Not I and Footfalls. Corporeality is the central theme of these works, which also connects them to an important and celebrated source of study and inspiration for the dramatist, The Comedy of Dante Alighieri. The influence played by Dante's descriptions of the body, particularly in the cantica of Inferno, is visible in Beckett's works for the ways in which the organs of perception and expression are treated at both textual and theatrical level. In the three plays the activities of mouth, eyes, ears (and less relevantly, nose) constitute the narrative focus of the text, while the sensorial aspects derived by their presence on stage determine the kind of exchange at play between actors and spectators. Staging immobilized, constricted and barely visible characters who, narrating obscure, uncertain stories, obsessively try to make a sense of their existential and physical conditions, the author gives life to a metatheatrical language rooted on instability and doubt. After the introductory opening chapter, the second chapter looks at the language of Dante's Inferno and at its thematization of corporeality, introducing the continuities between the poem and Beckett's drama. The third chapter juxtaposes the characters and the uncertain...

Excerpt: Beckett is keenly interested in ways individuals unsuccesfully atempt to disown their past. His explorations into this reflect his awareness of being a survivor of the Second World War.

Review of Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television by Graley Herren.

Review of A Companion to Samuel Beckett edited by S.E. Gontarski.

Review of John Bolin, Beckett and the Modern Novel. Cambridge: University Press, 2013. Hardcover. xii+214. ISBN 978-1107029842. £50.0.

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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.