This thesis examines modernist short fiction in English from the 1890s to the 1980s, with particular reference to works by James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett and Donald Barthelme. The term 'interrogative' is evolved in the course of the study to describe the relationship of the reader and of interpretative discourse to the form. It is argued that the modernist story is marked by indeterminacy and a resistance to teleological structuration as a result of its narrative strategies of ellipsis, reticence and interdiction. Unlike those existing theories which emphasize 'unity' or 'ambiguity' in the short story, the interrogative approach takes as its starting point a post-Saussurean definition of language as differential and plurisignificant and uses this to demonstrate the form's constitutional resistance to determine critical exegesis.

Beginning again: the post-narrative art of Texts for nothing and How it is

"Complete with missing parts" : modernist short fiction as interrogative text

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Literature in the Archive of Terror: Badiou, Blanchot, Beckett

The long-standing problem of understanding self-identity has been most recently addressed as a matter of narrative form. Paul Ricoeur (1985a), as well as others, has examined how the discordant experience of time is structured by narrative form and can constitute an identity. This article attempts to extend his analysis to a reading of the late prose work of Samuel Beckett. While Beckett's approach to narrative identity shares similarity with Ricoeur's analysis, there are important distinctions. In contrast to Ricoeur's emphasis on the way narrative can order temporal experience, an examination of the works Stories and Texts for Nothing (1967) and How It Is (1964) serve to illustrate Beckett's experimentation with the generative power of the narrative voice. For Beckett, it seems that the very act of narration through time can give rise to problematic ambiguity and semantic multiplicity. It is argued that the literary works of Beckett complement that of Ricoeur's by attacking order and meaning; his texts ...

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The quest for self-identity: time, narrative, and the late prose of samuel beckett

The impulse to think, to inquire, to reweave oneself ever more thoroughly, is not wonder but terror. --Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity A little formalism turns one away from History, but ... a lot brings one back to it. --Roland Barthes, Mythologies It is a commonplace within Beckett studies today that the philosophical modes of interpretation that dominated critical analyses of the Beckettian oeuvre at least since the 1980s have been challenged in recent years by the rising popularity of archival methods of scholarship. Papers presented at the "Beckett: Out of the Archive" conference that took place at the University of York in June 2011 were reprinted in a special issue of the journal Modernism /Modernity in November 2011, thereby consolidating the academic influence of this mode of research on Beckett's life and writing. In his editor's introduction to this special issue, Peter Fifield writes that "Beckett is an archivist's author. Storing his proofs, drafts, diaries, and notebooks for up to sixty years, the author has left textual remains that document his development as a writer in great detail. These are held in numerous libraries--public, academic, and private--but are also steadily becoming available to a wider audience via publications in print and online" (2011, 673). Archival research into Beckett's work has been invigorated in no small part by the publication through Cambridge University Press of two volumes (with two more forthcoming) of Beckett's letters. (1) With the vast amount of archival material becoming increasingly accessible, it should come as no surprise that philosophical and hermeneutical methods of approaching Beckett's writing have started to lose influence in the contemporary climate of Beckett criticism. At this stage, then, we might do well to reconsider if philosophical and hermeneutical types of readings cannot still further our understanding of Beckett without abstracting his writing from the particular historical and biographical contexts of its composition and reception. This divergence of critical approaches is starkly visible in the readings of Texts for Nothing presented in Jonathan Boulter's "Does Mourning Require a Subject?" (2004) and in Sean Kennedy's "Does Beckett Studies Require a Subject?" (2009), which Kennedy frames as a critical riposte to philosophically minded Beckett scholars like Boulter. Whereas Boulter reads the narrator of Beckett's Texts for Nothing as "unable to present itself as a stable, unified (or potentially unified) subject," such that it becomes uncertain whether or not "the concepts of mourning and trauma," specifically, become "unworkable in the texts of Samuel Beckett" (2004, 333, 346), Kennedy, in trying to make "the case for a historicized reading of Beckett's work," is insistent that this sacrificing of the Beckettian subject to the ahistorical paradigm of poststructuralist interpretation (Kennedy cites Boulter's reading as emblematic of this position), this eagerness to merely dispense with the subject of history" in Beckett's work, "can only be a debilitating gesture." Kennedy asks rhetorically,"In the absence of history/memory, is an ethical Beckett possible? Does Beckett studies require a subject, and does that subject require a politics?" (2009, 25). In response to this ongoing debate, this article argues that to exclude either philosophical or archival modes of critique is to preclude an investigation into how Beckett's persistent engagement with historical phenomena and cultural discourses is manifested in those aspects of his work to which poststructuralist readings of Beckett's prose are singularly responsive. Rather than hunt down references to real historical events and places in Texts for Nothing, of which there are a diverse many, I link an influential strand of postwar French literary criticism to Beckett's postwar writings by focusing on the historical and philosophical archive of terror. …

The Terror of Literature in Beckett's Texts for Nothing

This article considers the pervasiveness of the theme of ending both in Beckett's work and in Beckett criticism. Accepting the view that Beckett's experiments with narrative undermine the possibility of closure, the article examines the nature of Beckettian temporality, its sense of "finality without end", in relation to the temporality of postmodernism as discussed by Fredric Jameson and Frank Kermode. Drawing on the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard, the article seeks to understand Beckettian temporality as neither a continuation of, nor a rupture with, the time of modernity, but a "rewriting" akin to Freud's interminable analysis.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/25781480

Beginning again: the post-narrative art of Texts for nothing and How it is

Citations

"Complete with missing parts" : modernist short fiction as interrogative text

Literature in the Archive of Terror: Badiou, Blanchot, Beckett

The quest for self-identity: time, narrative, and the late prose of samuel beckett

The Terror of Literature in Beckett's Texts for Nothing

Beckett's Endlessness: Rewriting Modernity and the Postmodern Sublime