Psychic spaces in three plays by Samuel Beckettthe abjected semiotic intruding in to the symbolic

Download

12626175.pdf

Date

2021-3-04

Author

DEMİR, Betül

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

356
views

617
downloads

This thesis examines the intrusion of the abjected semiotic into the symbolic in Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Happy Daysby Samuel Beckett. A survey of studies in drama finds that the recent spatial turn has largely ignored spaces of drama, and that the current state of spatial criticism alone cannot adequately explain spaces in the drama of Beckett. Spatial binarism and the imagery of death, being relevant in these plays, are used as the initial steps for investigating psychic spatialityin the drama of Beckett and provide the analytical tools of this thesis. Furthermore, these elements of the plays also repeatedly demonstrate the very concerns that Kristeva refers to in her theory of the symbolic, the semiotic and abjection. According toKristeva, the subject-to-be becomes a subject in the symbolic and the semiotic no longer exists after the thetic break. There may still be, however, vestiges or residues of the semiotic that may appear as abjected elements such as death. The hypothesis ofthis thesis is thatinthe aforementioned plays Beckettshowstheintrusion of the abjected semioticinto thesymbolic, and thisis donethrough thefollowingthree steps: firstly, a spatial binarism is created between the onstageand offstage spacesat the beginning of each play; secondly, gradual information is provided through language and actions of the characters about the offstage space that is depicted with imagesof deaththroughout the plays; thirdly, the imagery of death or the abjected semiotic initially abjected to the offstage space intrudes into the onstage space and the order in the onstage space is broken at the end of each play. Therefore, itis suggested that, in the drama of Beckett, the abjected semiotic intrudes into the symbolic but that this has no outcome, because the symbolic cannot deal with these abjected semiotic vestiges.

Subject Keywords

Beckett, The semiotic, The symbolic, Abjection, Psychic space

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/89805

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Postmodernist and poststructuralist elements in Samuel Beckett’s "The Trilogy" and Oğuz Atay’s "Tehlikeli Oyunlar" Kaya, Hilal; İçöz, Nursel; Department of English Language Teaching (2009) The aim of this thesis is to analyse the postmodernist and poststructuralist elements in Samuel Beckett’s The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable and Oğuz Atay’s Tehlikeli Oyunlar. One text from English literature and one from Turkish literature will be compared. In Beckett’s and Atay’s novels the main issues of postmodernism and poststructuralism such as subject-object dialectic, the metaphysics of presence, the correspondence theory of truth, origin, self, language, intertextuality and metafiction...
Jungian archetypes in samuel beckett's trilogy Kızılcık, Hale; Sönmez, Margaret Jeanne M.; Department of English Literature (2005) This thesis analyses the Jungian archetypes employed in Beckett's trilogy. It begins with an overview of Jungian archetypes and the relation of these archetypes to the fundamental themes dealt with in Beckett's work. The thesis then asserts that some archetypal features occur almost obsessively and are further clearly implicated in the main themes of the trilogy. The central archetypal patterns that frequently appear in the novel are the hero's quest, return to paradise and rebirth. This dissertation is the...
Existentialism and Samuel Beckett’s two plays: endgame and happy days Tan, Tijen; İçöz, Nursel; Department of Foreign Language Education (2007) This thesis carries out an analysis of the plays by Samuel Beckett, Endgame and Happy Days. It achieves this by exploring how the playwright’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’s two plays and Existentialism, and some characters in both plays display the existentialist man who is looking f...
The portrayal of universal harmony and order in Edmund Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes Tekin, Burcu; Sönmez, Margaret Jeanne M.; Department of English Literature (2010) This thesis analyses Edmund Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes in light of the holistic Renaissance world view and poet’s collection of various tradition of ideas. Spenser’s treatment of love is explored as the cosmic principle of harmony. Universal order is examined with an emphasis on the position of man in the ontological hierarchy. Thus, this thesis investigates Spenser’s own suggestions to imitate macrocosmic harmony and order in the microcosmic level.
A Search for the foundations of natural law Tunçay, Serkan; Ergüden, Akın; Department of Philosophy (2002) The present thesis analyzes the relationship between law and morality in a historical context and will attempt to present that there is a necessary connection between two spheres. Historical developments of the idea of natural law will be traced in the first three chapters of the thesis in order to present the necessary relationship between the sphere of legality and that of morality. In the fourth chapter the arguments of positivist theories against to natural law theory will be discussed. In the last chap...

Citation Formats

B. DEMİR, “Psychic spaces in three plays by Samuel Beckettthe abjected semiotic intruding in to the symbolic,” M.A. - Master of Arts, Middle East Technical University, 2021.