My dissertation, Gathering Thinglessness: Samuel Becketts Essayistic Approach to Nothing, responds to the dominant strand in Beckett criticism that figures the writer as a philosopher of nothing whether of Democritean, existentialist, or deconstructionist voids. In contrast, I argue that Becketts literary texts approximate philosophy in their essayistic style, characterized by the incorporation of multiple, contradictory sources in a fragmented form. While philosophical analyses are often designed to demonstrate that the literary texts are the equivalent of philosophical discourse, in the first chapter I argue that they actually serve to re-subordinate literature to philosophy since they depend on the pre-existing philosophical text to explain the literary one. In the second chapter, I review twentieth-century theory on the relationship between the fields to substantiate the point that the border between literature and philosophy remains unresolved since many of Platos original characterizations of poetry persist in varied forms. Since the question of the relationship between literature and philosophy is such a broad one, I then take a turn to examine nothing, a concept/image that is shared by both fields of thought to understand where Becketts use of the term fits on a continuum between the two fields. In chapter three, I argue that, contrary to a longstanding argument that Beckett proffers a consistent position on the nature of being as nothing, Becketts actually incorporates multiple, inconsistent philosophical positions on nothing into his work. In chapter four, I focus on Becketts aesthetic influences to demonstrate that his primary contribution to intellectual history was not to make an original argument about nothing, but to alter the formal properties that are conventionally associated with the word. In the final chapter, I conclude that Becketts aggregation of inconsistent philosophical and aesthetic sources and his adoption of a fragmented structure mirror the form of the Montaignian essay in the sense that it reflects the movements of an ever-shifting mind. In that way, Becketts writing falls on a continuum next to philosophy since his work adopts the style of the essay but also remains distinct from systematic thought.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-09252014-153646 |
| Date | 02 October 2014 |
| Creators | Marks, Dena |
| Contributors | Demastes, William, Kronick, Joseph, Protevi, John |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-09252014-153646/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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