Abstract EN:

Mourning and melancholy are central to the last texts of Samuel Beckett, Robert Pinget and Claude Simon. These authors share the same sense of disquiet about writing and its relation to the subject, its phantoms and the world. Each writer identifies writing as fundamentally deriving from a sense of loss and it is this very sense of loss that they explore, giving a form of writing characterised by an unrelieved sense of mourning and melancholy. The thesis will first establish a classification of things lost, while also identifying what it is that remains in the text, those aspects alone which the writer can count on-words and his sens of melancholy. From here the thesis will then indicate how mourning is expressed within the text, though voices, rhytms and images. Finally the thesis will explore to what extent the aesthetic of each writer can be linked to a wider, modern ethics of melancholy, founded on accepting and even demanding doubt, distance and and new tragic mode.