Samuel Beckett, philosophy and the limits of literary hermeneutics.

By gradually subtracting all that is superfluous to form in his works, Beckett indirectly dramatizes a silent complicity between literary hermeneutics and philosophy--a complicity that is suggested but not fully elaborated in the author's critical writings on obligation and need. In the prose works, especially, familiar literary "reference points" such as time, place, plot and the presence of a narrating center are put under stress in obscure textual "scenarios" that are neither thematic, representational, nor consistently referential. The oftentimes frustrating result is an unorthodox "system" of reference that actively breaks narrative from its mimetic moorings in traditional ontology, leaving it free to operate on its own terms: in the absence of determinate referents. My investigation, accordingly, proceeds from a simple caveat: any conclusions one draws through interaction with the texts will be one's own, never Beckett's. Despite the intractable look of Beckett's deontologized "wordscapes" for criticism, however, I submit that the act of engaging in interpretation--though it often means seeing our readings "fail" in the face of inadequate contextual and mimetic environments--creates productive tensions that can be approached philosophically. We are able to ask, for example, how and when hermeneutic strategies are apt to suppress inconsistencies inherent to the process of narration--such as the effects of repetition, recursiveness and semantic "drift"--as if obeying an unwritten requirement that the explicated text mean something rather than nothing. In such cases, I think hermeneutics has much to gain from reading poststructuralist theory. Conversely, too stoic a reliance on theory surely misses the essence of Beckett's dense inter-referentiality in narrative, the inimitable "feel" of which is often best explained in sensory or even visceral terms. Making frequent reference to contemporary critical theory and philosophy, I ask what the difficulties we encounter in Beckett can teach us about the limitations of hermeneutic ideology in general. To speak of interpretation this way means both addressing the shortcomings of conventional literary hermeneutics and acknowledging the ineliminable presence of those limits--as philosophy--in any form of critique.PhDEnglish Language and LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/104953/1/9624626.pdfDescription of 9624626.pdf : Restricted to UM users only