(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.