Towards delogocentrism [Elektronische Ressource] : a study of the dramatic works of Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard and Caryl Churchill / vorgelegt von Fereshteh Varziri Nasab Kermany

Informations

• Publié par: goethe_universitat_frankfurt_am_main
• Publié le: 01 janvier 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 34
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Towards Delogocentrism:
A study of the Dramatic works of Samuel
Beckett, Tom Stoppard and Caryl Churchill

Inauguraldissertation
zur Erlangung des Grades eines Doktor der Philosophie
im Fachbereich Neuere Philologien
der Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität
zu Frankfurt am Main

vorgelegt von
Fereshteh Varziri Nasab Kermany
aus: Kerman (Iran)

Oktober 2008
1. Gutachter: Herr Prof. Dr. Eckhard Lobsien
2. Gutachter: Frau Prof. Dr. Susanne Scholz
Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 18.02.2009 To those whose voices remain unheard
Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEGEMENT ............................................................................................................................. I
A B S T R A C T ..................................................................................................................................... II
INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER 1 BECKETT AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF LANGUAGE ......................................... 20
CHAPTER 2 THE DEFEATED AUTHOR AND HIS ENDGAME ................................................... 47
CHAPTER 3 THE FRAGMENTED SELF: BECKETT’S “NOT I” ................................................. 67
CHAPTER4 METADRAMA, INTERTEXTUALITY, REALITY: STOPPARD’S ROSENCRANTZ
AND GUILDENSTERN ARE D E A D ......................................................................... 87
CHAPTER 5 BEYOND REPRESENTATION: THE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND ...................... 112
CHAPTER 6 PLAYING WITH WITTGENSTEIN: STOPPARD’S DOGG’S HAMLET AND
C A H O O T ’ S M A C B E T H .......................................................................................... 130
CHAPTER 7 THE CONSTRUCTION AND DISRUPTION OF POWER STRUCTURES THROUGH
DISCOURSE: SOFTCOPS A N D M A D F O R EST ................................................... 145
CHAPTER 8 TOWARDS A DELOGOCENTRIC NARRATIVE ................................................... 172
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................. 197
REFERENCES ................................................................................................................................. 205
ABSTRACT DEUTSCH ...................................................................................................................... 212
Acknowledgement

I would like to express my gratitude to those who gave me the possibility of
completing this Thesis. I am grateful to the department of English and American
studies of Goethe University for giving me the opportunity to commence this
dissertation. I wish to thank Professor Susanne Scholz, who accepted to be the
reader of my work. I also appreciate the valuable and stimulating comments made by
Professor Hans-Thies Lehmann on my proposal. I am particularly indebted to my
advisor, Professor Eckhard Lobsien, whose insightful reading, professional advices,
and productive criticism made the completion of this thesis possible. My gratitude
also goes to Attila Kiss and Daniel Jernigan for providing the access to their articles
for me. Finally, I would like to give my special thanks to my husband, Thomas
Pausch, whose support was a great encouragement for me to accomplish my
undertaking.

I A b s t ract
The relation between reality and language, the instability of language as a
signification system, the representation crisis, and the borders of interpretation are
the controversial issues that have engaged not only philosophers, but also many
authors, translators, and literary critics. Some philosophers like Derrida accuse
Western thinking of being obsessed with binary oppositions. In Derrida’s view,
Western tradition resorts to external references as God, truth, origin, center and
reason to stabilize the signification system. Since these concepts lack an internal
sense and there is no transcendental signified that can fix these signifiers, language
turns to an instable system by means of which no fixed meaning can be created.
Many authors like Beckett, Stoppard, and Caryl Churchill also noticed this
impossibility of language. While Derrida’s deconstructive approach to this crisis has
an epistemological nature, these playwrights present an aesthetic solution by turning
the deconstructive potential of language against itself in text and performance.
This dissertation aims at exploring their performing methods and dramatic texts
to demonstrate how their delogocentric strategies work. By analyzing their plays, I will
examine i f their use of signifiers that have no references in reality, intentional
misconceptions, disintegrated subjectivities, decentered narratives, and experimental
performances can help them undermine the prevailing logocentrism of Western
thought. The examination of the change in aesthetic strategies from Beckett, who
belongs to earlier stages of post modernism, to Caryl Churchill, who should perform
in a globalized world with increasing dominance of speed and information, is another
aim of this research. In my view, Beckett’s obsession with unspeakable, absurdity,
and disintegration of subjectivity develops to Stoppard’s language games,
metadrama, and anti-representation and culminates in Churchill’s anti-narrative texts
and pluralistic performances. The monophony of Beckett’s dramatic texts is replaced
by the polyphony of Churchill’s performances, which are a mixture of theater, dance
and music. However, all explored dramatic texts in this dissertation have something
in common: they are language games, which have no claim on a faithful
representation of reality or transcendental truth.
II Introduction
The clarity of language has always been the aim of those who were in search of
truth or meaning. Because of the inefficiency of their medium, namely language, thei r
hermeneutical efforts for finding the exact meaning, the truth, or the core of an idea in
a text have failed. Throughout the history of thought, the reluctance of language to
yield to clarity, and its high potential for creating misunderstanding, ambiguity, and
vagueness have been the main hindrances for theologians or philosophers for
understanding the metaphysical form of reality. Their ideal of finding a transparent
language through which the reader can settle a concept or idea without problem, has
permanently been disappointed by the free play of signs. With the weakening of
positivistic approaches to language and thought in the twentieth century, language
crisis took new dimensions. Not only language but also the issue of truth were
examined in a new light. By bringing language into a focus of interest for philosophy,
philosophers like Mauthner and Wittgenstein opened the way for new interpretation
of reality and its representation. Wittgenstein’s book Tractatus, for instance, i s
devoted to the examination of the relation between thinking and language. In his
view, the borders of language determine the borders of our world (Tractatus: 5.6),
because we can only explain our experiences through words. Thus, as Begam
maintains, “Where there are no sentences, there is no truth…” (1996:16) Wittgenstein
proposes in this book, that tautological expressions of logic are literally nonsense;
they do not convey any information about what the facts are, they only reveal the
underlying structure of all language, thought, and reality (Tractatus: 6.1). In his later
books, like Philosophical investigations, he takes a closer look at language and
comes to the conclusion that there is no ultimate language; we have only local
language games (Sprachspiele), whose rules are set in the games themselves. One
1 word in a language game may vary in signification in the other. Wittgenstein’s idea
that “Alle Philosophie ist nur Sprachkritik”(Wittgenstein,1953: 299), invalidates
philosophy as an ontological means for discovering reality or transcendental truths.
Following Wittgenstein, many other twentieth-century philosophers, like Derrida,
Lyotard, and Foucault, deny the stability of signification system and the referentiality
between language and reality. In Derrida’s view, for instance, meaning is perpetually
deferred by supplementation or substitution. In his texts Writing and Difference and
Of Grammatology, he argues against the validity of logocentrism in the world after
Nietzsche and Freud. Freud’s claim, that writing is not completely conscious and
Nietzsche’s statement, that “truth” is just “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies,
and anthropomorphisms” (Nietzsche, qtd. in Anthony Easthope & Kate McGowan
114), contradict the positivistic presumptions about language, identity, and truth.
Derrida believes that although the “decentring” that happened in our age is “part of
the totality of an era,” nevertheless, “the Nietzschean critique of metaphysics, the
critique of the concepts of being and truth,….the Freudian critique of self-presence,
that is, the critique of consciousness, of subject, of self-identity” and “Heideggerean
destruction of metaphysics of onto-theology, of the determination of being as
presence,” have played an important role in this disruption of the concept of structure