ENGLISH ABSTRACTS OF FRENCH ARTICLES

Angela Moorjani LE COMPLEXE DE PROMÉTHÉE OU SOUS LE SIGNE DU FEU: Tyrannie et volonté de savoir chez Beckett

In this essay I explore the Prometheus complex by crisscrossing from the notions derived from religion, mythology, and Heraclitus that con- nect fire with intelligence, power, and the divine to the modern thought of Bachelard, Bion, and Foucault that links sexuality and power with the will to knowledge. Beckett, on the contrary, taking his cue from the gnostics, reduces such fire idolatry to ashes. In Watt, Eleutheria, Molloy, Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Catastrophe (to cite only these), tyrannical agents are mocked as their fire is extinguished, their thunder stolen or stilled, sapping their ‘directorial’ powers.

Yannick Hoffert ASPECTS DE L’EAU DANS LE THÉÂTRE DE BECKETT

Beckett’s theatre systematically attempts to reject the euphoric values that might be associated with the water element, when it is part of the description of a landscape, by linking it to imprisonment, absence, death and degradation. In Beckett’s later works, waters increasingly turn out to be expressions of the hardly bearable inner world of the characters. Thus Beckett’s writing contributes to the representation of life as a paradox experienced by his characters. Whether an object of discourse or a metaphor for speech, water reveals how life is essentially trapped in a core of impossibilities.

Chiara Montini SINKING IN THE MUD: From an Abandoned Work et le difficile retour à l’anglais

Was From an Abandoned Work really abandoned? Or is it a new be- ginning from what had only temporarily been abandoned, the English language? If so, this new beginning would start from the mud, in which the narrator is sinking. Beckett wrote this short text in order to over- come the impasse which follows The Unnamable. His going back to his “mother tongue” brings him back to what he had been able to escape by writing in French. His violence, which recalls the violence of those who 402 were dominated by anger in Dante’s hell, is the cause of his sinking in the mud and is the symptom of repression rising to the surface.

Mireille Bousquet LA BOUE DANS COMMENT C’EST: “Petits paquets grammaire d’oiseau”

The mud is not the least of the elements in Beckett’s work. In Comment c’est, its disquieting presence moulds the narrator – a shapeless sub- stance one can either drink or sink into. Although the mud could most evidently be interpreted as an image of the human condition, my aim is to show that it operates on a poetic level and through a complex inter- weaving of language and value. Rather than trying to bring out the meaning of this ambiguous and suggestive element, I want to focus on how the mud produces significance and creates new possibilities of hearing and seeing, through the invention of a renewed mode of saying.

Michel Bertrand L’ÊTRE DE BOUE NE SAURAIT ÊTRE UN ÊTRE DEBOUT: L’eau et la terre dans Molloy de Samuel Beckett

Molloy, like its double Moran, exists only because he is ‘a mud’ being (‘un être de boue’). For this reason, the polysemia of the term, which Littré’s dictionary details, accounts for the extreme richness of these rejects which the society regards as harmful parasites because they re- verse the hierarchy of the social scale of values. This polysemia of the term ‘mud’ will thus lead us to consider social, ethical, metaphysical and scriptural dimensions of the first novel written in French by Beckett. The central metaphor of this excremential mixture of water and earth induces an existential postulation: Molloy as well as Moran cannot be held upright. Lastly, considering the characters in prospect, it will be advisable to compare them to the concept of “man of habits” that Samuel Beckett defines in Proust..

Isabelle Ost “ET RÊVE D’UN ESPACE SANS ICI NI AILLEURS”: Parcours en terre beckettienne

Among the four elements, the earth seems to be for Beckett the matter which allows the human being to go back to his roots, through the most