(Un)Written: Potentiality in the Novels of Samuel Beckett and Elizabeth Bowen

Both Samuel Beckett and Elizabeth Bowen create worlds haunted by worlds that could have been, yet they are rarely studied comparatively. Taking up Giorgio Agamben's definition of potentiality as a latent power existing both inside and outside reality, this thesis will use philosophically-inflected close readings to unravel the role of

potentiality in fiction. By setting Beckett and Bowen's novels in conversation, my project asks for the first time how Agamben's conception of the state of exception, characteristic of potentiality, may be an attribute of their styles, and what their extraordinary portrayals of marginal figures have in common.