Les Églogues “pour rien” de Samuel Beckett Et in Arcadia ego

Texts for Nothing can be read and elucidated in the light of the pastoral mode. In fact, the aesthetics of vulnerability are not dissimilar from those found in Theocritus and Virgil. Moreover, the apparent break with the idyllic world from Text 3 does not necessarily signify a rejection of pastoral but its continuation on a less elegiac mode. This article demonstrates by focusing, especially, on Erwin Panofsky’s and Louis Marin’s studies of a famous pastoral painting by Poussin: Et in Arcadia Ego.