‘You, my body, and my mind, one of these will go’: Madness as Disguise in Samuel Beckett's Murphy and Endgame

ithin the wide topic of disguise in literature, we could signal a subcurrent which can be found in a number of literary texts: the idea of madness as a disguise, i.e. the creation or invention of a ‘false self’ as a mask which is presented to the world and which conceals the real self. In The Divided Self (1960), R. D. Laing deals with the “personality, false self, mask, front or persona that (...) [schizophrenic] wear” (73). Using as a basis Laing’s theories on schizophrenia and the creation of a false-self system, we will analyze two works by Samuel Beckett: Murphy and Endgame, where we find the uses of madness as disguise in a series of ways: through the usage of ‘disguised’ language (what we could refer to as schizophrenese) which acts as a mask for real meaning; through odd ‘schizophrenic’ behaviour on the part of the characters (which screens real intentions), and, mainly, through the creation of a ‘false self’ which acts as a disguise and barrier between the inner self and the real world. These two works by Samuel Beckett, where real intentions and meanings are continuously concealed and disguised in a desperate attempt to preserve the inner self, lend themselves to an analysis of madness as disguise, precisely the one we attempt to carry out in our paper.

Las poéticas explícitas de Antonio Colinas

Poets' thoughts about poetry have long been the subject of much attention. Since Classical Antiquity this has given rise to powerful reflections about literature, influencing texts which would then become part of academic discourse. However, these have also been used to help to explain or exemplify questions the academic discipline of Literary Theory have failed to address properly, since such questions related to the process of creation justifiably give attention to the writers' own experiences of such a process. Nevertheless, although the content of texts in which poets explain their own creation or specify key aspects of the literary process has been taken into account, there has not been any systematic study of the formal aspects of the discourse coming from the creator. The reason lies in the fact that the discourse of the creator takes different and variant directions that complicate its definition and distinction in relation to other kinds of similar texts. The first part, theoretical in nature, has emerged from the study of explicit poetics by numerous authors, as well as from critical bibliography. This seeks to identify common characteristics of these texts. Conversely, the second and third parts aims to find the individuality of Colinas' poetics, which manifests itself fundamentally in its content. Because of this, it is the study of the core parts of Colinas' poetic thinking expressed in the trends of his explicit poetics that will constitute a substantial part of this section of research...

Ideología y narrativa: la función significativa, el pensamiento estetizante y las relaciones humanas

This research deals with the study of ideology in the novel. Our motivation has philosophical implications and refers to fundamental and foundational issues of literary theory and aesthetics in general. Thus, the definition of the object of study for a correct formulation of these questions, as appropriate, represents the first difficulty of this research. The concept of ideology is of a problematic nature due to the polysemy of the term and the Marxist pejorative use associated to it. In our work, however, we understand ideology in a general and literal way: study and system of ideas. This research seeks to justify the study of ideology and its relevance in the investigation of narrative text as a system of ideas for understanding the world that determines the individual's relationship with it within the novel. The epistemological approach of our research relates the concept of ideology in terms of literary hermeneutics, critical theory, and dialogic criticism, linked trough the critical inquiry and the signifying function of ideology. Furthermore, the ideological representation of the signifying function in literary texts responds to aesthetic criteria, and therefore aesthetics constitutes the specificity of the methodological approach of this study. Bakhtińs essential text on literary theory, "The Problem of Content, Material and Form in Verbal Arts", allows us to develop an understanding of the literary phenomena based on the concept of aestheticided thought. The main references to establish the foundational criteria of our investigation based on the hermeneutic-aesthetic relationship are P. Ricoeur, M. Bakhtin, and J. Habermas...

Luis Bello: vida y época. Su producción periodística y literaria

Taking into account the cultural and literary wealth of the first third of the twentieth century in Spain, this doctoral dissertation aims to increase our knowledge of literary journalism during that period through a monographic study of one of its greatest champions, the journalist and writer Luis Bello Trompeta (1872-1935). Although Bello enjoyed noteworthy success and popularity in life, he has since fallen into an almost complete yet unjustifiable oblivion. Bello’s lifetime coincided with a brilliant period of Spanish culture, one that is almost unanimously considered not simply a Silver Age but a veritable golden age of journalism in Spain. Nevertheless, the period is often unjustly reduced to a short list of names and works of extremely well known and well studied writers. There is a tendency to forget that such writers emerged within a vast, influential context comprising numerous cultural products, writers, and works that need to be recovered. More specifically, the general inclination to privilege the book as a period’s sole bearer of literary or testimonial significance often deprives us of richly complementary journalistic sources such as the chronicle or the newspaper report. Indeed, together with the book, such articles can help us achieve a broader understanding of both literary history and the personality of individual writers or the course of historical events. The fact that authors like Luis Bello are practically unknown today is likely related to the time-sensitive, intrinsically ephemeral nature of journalism, the print medium in which Bello published most of his work. Yet in spite of its passing nature, the press witnessed remarkable developments in Spain at the time, undergoing a transformative process of consolidation...

Dios y la dama como referentes en la poesía amorosa española (siglos XV-XVII). A propósito de la hipérbole sacroprofana

In this dissertation I will study the phenomenon of the hipérbole sacroprofana in different Castillian writers of the 15th to the 17th centuries, in order to show in what does this fact consists, and how it has to be sorted out. Thus, I will also show how this tendency unfolds and how the use of either one or another resource leads the hipérbole towards different expressive horizons. Although the hipérbole sacroprofana is usually detected by most of scholars, it has never met proper attention, so that it has turned into a jumble in which the most disparate instances of a lady’s praise. Yet, an accurate analysis of this phenomenon reveals that this is not the case, and that this resource has manifold aspects and varying intentions and expressive ways as well. In this dissertation, where some five thousand hipérboles are analysed, I point out the various kinds of instances, and I classify them according to their expression and their literary-intellectual interweaving. Besides I monitor this fact to explain how hipérbole varies with the passage of times. By so doing a deficiency in the history of literary criticism, which mistook and likened all sorts of hipérboles in poetical texts, is eased. So we can see that, in its origins, hipérbole was confined to using sacred terms in profane poems out of their context (which I call hipérbole léxica o de inserción terminológica). This resource was effectual insofar as the use of words religiously connoted carried along devout attitudes towards poems of earthly love so that the lady and the feeling that the author professed became “adulterated” by Christian attitudes...

Propuesta de un análisis metafórico-poético en una novela de ciencia ficción: 2001, una odisea del espacio

The aim of this doctoral thesis is to analyse both the text (production) and the set of cognition processes which facilitate the understanding of a masterpiece of Science Fiction: 2001, A Space Odyssey from a new perspective. Unlike other literary theories, texts in cognitive poetics (i.e. Structuralism, Generative Linguistics, Literary Criticism) are projected on the readerś minds by means of cognitive procedures. Cognitive poetics uses tools of cognitive science in order to understand literature (and in this particular case, Science Fiction). This has lead to a great change in our understanding of texts, literary and otherwise. This literary analysis was carried out on the Science Fiction genre based on the assumptions of cognitive poetics. Due to the peculiar kind of subjects touched upon by this genre, it has been theorised that the type of metaphor used for both its creation and style are rather different from other genres. Science Fiction coincides with other genres of writing in that it contains its own specific ways of providing language with a meaning while making it so innovative that many literary theories point out that it is written differently or that it is necessary to possess single reading codes in order to be fully understood. The methodology used for this thesis required a metaphorical basic and poetic conceptual analysis according to the poetical metaphor theory developed by Lakoff and Turner (1989). The aim of this metaphorical study is to analyse the basic and conceptual structure of 2001, A Space Odyssey by A. C. Clarke. The parameters of literary conceptualization of Science Fiction established by Peter Stockwell in his Poetics of Science Fiction (2000) were also applied in order to analyse this novel. The ICMs (Idealised Cognitive Models) were then examined to determine the presence of isomorphism related to the production level...