Radio drama developed as a genre as new media proliferated and challenged the cultural primacy of print. The methods of production and distribution and the literary genres that developed during the age of print provided models for radio playwrights to follow but also cultural forces for them to challenge. This dissertation considers these dual influences of print on the radio drama of four playwrights: Orson Welles, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beckett, and Tom Stoppard. Each playwright “remediates” the printed page in radio plays by adapting or evoking the form of various literary texts, including novels (Welles), travel writing (Thomas), diaries and transcribed speech (Beckett), and historical writing (Stoppard). By representing written texts in an electronic, primarily oral medium, these authors examined the status of literary expression in an age of ascendant electronic media. Welles’s The War of the Worlds and Huckleberry Finn, Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and other broadcasts, Beckett’s Rough for Radio II and Embers, and Stoppard’s In the Native State highlight defining features of the print tradition and reveal how practices of writing and “reading” changed in the radio environment. These plays suggest that radio prompted writers to reconsider the literary author’s creative role, the text’s stability, and the audience’s interaction with the work. “Radio Texts” ultimately argues, therefore, that radio drama’s significance transcends its place in media history and dramatic criticism; the works I examine also point to radio plays’ important role in authors’ re-evaluation of literary expression in a changing twentieth-century media ecology. / text

<p>This study constitutes an attempt to bring the notion of stupidity into relation with ethics and creativity, through a reading of Samuel Beckett's Endgame. Employing Emmanuel Lévinas' theories on ethics - the responsible responsiveness in regard to the Other and the concept of the Face - the objective is to demonstrate how stupidity, conceived as lack of control and knowledge, functions as a precondition for the ethical relation between humans, as well as that of the individual to her creativity.</p>

This paper considers two purposes for actor training—textual interpretation and devising original works—through the teaching of a class based on contemporary theatrical clown and physical theatre exercises which are then applied to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Devised work can be used to interpret a script, and a script can be used as a jumping-off point to devise new works. Beginning with an explanation of the teaching methods for the class, the paper then gives a background of clowns who performed in Beckett’s plays, and analyzes various productions' use of games to enliven text. Exercises from the class are used as examples of exploring the uncovering of clown personas and the application of games to both Beckett scene-work and invented theatre pieces. The students’ final performances are examined to demonstrate the effectiveness of the classwork, confirming that textual interpretation and devising are complementary instead of opposing practices.

L'œuvre à l'étude dans cet essai est la nouvelle intitulée Premier Amour de Samuel Beckett. À travers l'analyse de deux mises en scène de l’acte d'inscription présentes dans cette courte fiction, ce mémoire traite de la question que nous posent les inscriptions lorsque nous les lisons et lorsque nous les inscrivons. Il se divise donc en deux chapitres : le premier déploie l'étude de l'inscription linguistique en tant qu'inscription visible et lisible; le second se concentre sur l'inscription en tant qu'elle est marquée par le concept de legs. En caractérisant et en comparant ces deux inscriptions, d’une part funéraire (l'épitaphe que compose le narrateur pour lui-même suite à la mort de son père) et d’autre part amoureuse (le nom que trace le narrateur au moment où il « tombe amoureux »), ce mémoire expose comment Premier Amour peut être envisagé comme un premier pas dans une compréhension générale de la constitution écrite d'un « legs littéraire ». Surtout, il explicite comment s’orchestre l'imbrication conceptuelle de l’inscription et du legs qu'elle véhicule et présuppose, puisque cette imbrication est inhérente à la compréhension de notre monde et de la littérature. En conclusion, cette étude mène à considérer le rapport conflictuel entre la contemporanéité rêvant d’un monde sans inscriptions et l’inévitabilité de l’inscription. / This dissertation deals with the representations of the act of inscribing in Samuel Beckett’s short story Premier Amour with a particular focus on two specific inscriptions – namely firstly, the funeral (the epitaph the narrator composes for himself after his father’s death) and secondly, the beloved (the name he inscribes once he “falls in love”). By looking at these, the dissertation investigates the notions of both reading and writing. The dissertation is divided into two chapters: the first, which looks at the inscription as something visible and legible; and the second, which focuses on inscribing as an act which has a legacy. By using and comparing these two approaches, this dissertation demonstrates how Premier Amour can be seen as a first step towards a general comprehension of a written “literary legacy”. Specifically, the dissertation shows the linguistic construction of the conceptual interlacing of the inscriptions and the legacy it conveys and presupposes, as this interlacing is inherent to our understanding of the literary and the human world. By means of a conclusion, this dissertation considers the conflicting relationship between, on the one hand, the contemporaneousness which dreams of a world without inscription, and on the other hand, the inevitability of inscription.

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.

Samuel Beckett's Film has been the focus of several articles in the past decade. While current investigations of Beckett's film are diverse, what most of them share is their dependence on biographical data to support their readings. Many scholars who have written on Beckett's failed cinematic excursion, for example, point to Beckett's letter of 1936 to Sergei Eisenstein. However, the link between Beckett's interest in film and his admiration for James Joyce has sadly been overlooked. Both Irish writers saw the artistic possibilities in film and both admired the Russian silent film legend, Sergei Eisenstein. Although there is no record of Joyce and Beckett discussing cinema or of Beckett knowing about Joyce's meeting with Eisenstein in 1929, it seems unlikely that Beckett would not have known something about these meetings or Joyce's much earlier film enterprise, the Volta. By re-examining Film and speculating on the possible three way connections between Eisenstein, Joyce and Beckett, I wish to add a footnote to Beckett studies which hopefully will lead others to wander on the Beckett-Joyce-Eisenstein trail and which will open up further discussions of Film. Beckett's film is haunted by the memory of his friendship with James Joyce and his admiration for Eisenstein's talent, both of which are visible in the screen images and theme of Film.

Excerpt:On his 59th birthday, Samuel Beckett began writing his first television play, Eli Joe (1965), in which he explored the technological possibilities offered by the camera.

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