Nadia Louar

Bilingual Beckett: The figure(s) of bilingualism in Beckett’s work

Bilingualism in Samuel Beckett’s œuvre engages a process of rewriting that operates at all strata of his composition and generates a network of repetitions of which intertextuality, transposition, adaptation and all forms of doubling participate. It thus functions as the paradigm for all the formal decisions that led Beckett from being a novelist, to a playwright, a poet and a stage/film director and back. This paper proposes to elucidate the complexities of the author’s identity as a bilingual Irish writer-in-exile. Rather than assessing the author’s literary bilingualism as a fact of linguistic competence attached to a culture and a nation, I will conceptualize the phenomenon as an aesthetic category and show how the passage between French and English (and vice versa) is repeated in those between genres and media.

Keywords: Beckett, self-translation, bilingualism, figures, style

Biography

Nadia Louar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. She holds a PhD in French from UC Berkeley (2004). Her research focuses on literary bilingualism, Beckett studies, performance and Translation Studies, modern and contemporary French and francophone studies. Her recent publications include “Reconfiguration du ‘champ’: le règne du Beckett irlandais” in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui (2013) and “Beckett’s Art of Passing: From Corps to Bodies” (forthcoming). She is currently completing a manuscript on The Figure of Bilingualism in Beckett’s Work.