Michela Bariselli

This thesis explores and describes the comic features of Samuel Beckett’s prose works. It explores fundamental questions about Beckett’s humour. On the one hand, it investigates the nature of humour, and, on the other, it investigates what counts as humour in Beckett. This twofold investigation requires ‘attuning’ philosophy and literary criticism, where questions and tools of each discipline mutually sharpen and refine each other. Chapter 1 evaluates philosophical accounts of humour and identifies Incongruity Theory as the theory offering the best account of humour. According to this theory, a necessary and not sufficient condition for comic amusement is the perception of an incongruity. Chapter 2 starts exploring what counts as humour in Beckett by examining where comic incongruities are located. By doing so, this chapter puts the Incongruity Theory to the test, and, evaluates the analytical tools ordinarily used in describing humour. This exploration uses Ruby Cohn’s seminal description of Beckett’s humour as a springboard. This chapter individuates a comic layer which Cohn’s description has overlooked – the ‘comic of language acts’. Chapter 3 analyses Beckett’s texts in order to describe the comic devices that depend on the performance of language acts. In order to do so, the discussion makes use of Austin’s Theory of Speech Acts. As a result, this chapter develops a set of tools able to capture ‘the comic of language acts’, a comic layer which crucially shapes Beckett’s writing. Chapter 4 demonstrates how to make use of the set of tools developed in Chapter 3 by examining three key works of Beckett – More Pricks than Kicks, Watt, and Molloy. This examination leads to the individuation of three movements at the level of illocutionary acts – ‘twists’, ‘convolutions’, and ‘oscillations’ – which are informative of Beckett’s writing and of the experience of reading these works.

This article defends Noël Carroll’s incongruity theory of humour from the pressing criticism that his articulation of incongruity is too vague to serve as a key notion of the theory. I first distinguish between two versions of the criticism of vagueness: (i) the claim that Carroll’s notion of incongruity is vacuous, and (ii) the claim that Carroll’s notion allows for shoehorning. To reject (i), I put Carroll’s notion of incongruity to the test by analysing complex comic texts, demonstrating that it is not vacuous as it allows for capturing their similarities and differences. In response to (ii), I claim that Carroll’s notion of incongruity should be amended adding a pertinence condition, which requires that the element establishing the incongruity are part of the same context. Finally, I show that the pertinence condition helps Carroll replying to a set of counterexamples moved to his sufficiency conditions too.

This article analyses the figure of Celia, questioning the description that emerges from the main account of Beckett’s early women. This account, originally developed by Bryden (1993), claims that women in Beckett’s early prose are represented through the filter of the male gaze, and are constructed in opposition to, and as an obstacle for, the male hero. This article argues that, in Murphy, the mechanisms set to reduce Celia to a stereotypical Woman, are foregrounded, and hence disrupted, by the presence of several contradicting perspectives, including Celia’s own perspective.