1 Specialet fylder 179786 tegn, hvilket svarer til 75 - Aarhus Universitet

ENGLISH ABSTRACT
The main purpose of this thesis is to establish a more precise vocabulary of the term ”linguistic
scepticism”. This is done in three different tempi: to begin with, a historical/philosophical introduction
to linguistic scepticism and then an analysis of two novels – Austrian author Thomas
Bernhard’s Extinction and Irish Samuel Beckett’s Murphy.
The historical/philosophical introduction pivots around sprachskepsis as understood by the Irish
professor C.A.M Noble. Noble shows that the way we see language and its connection to reality
has changed dramatically throughout the last 200 years. Up to the end of the 18 th century, people
saw language as a God-given object, but in the romantic era people started misbelieving language
and its ability to express metaphysical experiences. This led to a total destruction of language;
people stopped thinking that language could convey reality. As a result language was divided into
two parts: the language itself and its reference to reality. This linguistic divide is illustrated in the
short text “Ein Brief” by the German author Hugo von Hofmannsthal. “Ein Brief” is about the
fictional figure Lord Chandos living around the fin-de-siècle in Germany who looses his faith in
language. Lord Chandos feels that he cannot speak about the objects of the world anymore and
the words in his mouth dissolves “like rotten fungus”.
After this historical/philosophical part, the thesis introduces Ludwig Wittgenstein and his
thoughts about sprachspiel. Sprachspiel is a term used as “the sum of all sentences and situations
where we find language”. Wittgenstein’s sprachspiel is a means to differ between Thomas Bernhard
and Samuel Beckett’s two novels. The analysis of novels, Extinction and Murphy, is therefore
a search for how Bernhard and Beckett use the language and its reference to reality. The thesis
shows that Bernhard’s literature seems to use the missing connection to reality as an opportunity
to set the language free and play with words and meaning. The linguistic scepticism in Bernhard’s
novel turns into sprachspiel. On the other hand, Samuel Beckett’s novel is destroying the language
and his literature wraps in the language in a solipsistic way. For Beckett, the language’s lack
of connection to reality is a way to write a literature of nothingness. In this sense, linguistic scepticism
presents the ability to write your self free - not only from reality but also from language
itself.
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