ABSTRACT
Carla Locatelli summarizes her account of how Beckett, in his comic prose, refined his techniques for representing this recognition. She identifies three phases in Beckett's comic writing between the 1930s and the 1980s: the parodic, the metanarrative and the discursive. Beckett's comic strategies keep changing throughout his production, but they always reflect a basic, modern uncertainty, whether they express transgressive wit, scornful suspicion, helpless irony, or radically open humor. For a clarification of the specificity of Beckett's comic strategies, it is probably worth recalling also Teun A. Van Dijk's definition of 'frame' as a type of information determined by context, so that it is clear that the freedom ensuing from the comic is a contextual transgression, or a contextual penetration-separation. A distinction between the culturally comic and the literary comic probably finds its theoretical roots in Cicero's De Oratore, where he established a marked opposition between facetia in re and facetia in dicto.
