Beckett and Stein

This Element provides the first extended comparative study of Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett's aesthetics and writings.

Georgina Nugent (Author)

9781108984355, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 25 May 2023

75 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 0.4 cm, 0.118 kg

What motivated Beckett, in 1937, to distance himself from the 'most recent work' of his mentor James Joyce, and instead praise the writings of Gertrude Stein as better reflecting his 'very desirable literature of the non-word'? This Element conducts the first extended comparative study of Stein's role in the development of Beckett's aesthetics. In doing so it redresses the major critical lacuna that is Stein's role and influence on Beckett's nascent bilingual aesthetics of the late 1930s. It argues for Stein's influence on the aesthetics of language Beckett developed throughout the 1930s, and on the overall evolution of his bilingual English writings, arguing that Stein's writing was itself inherently bilingual. It forwards the technique of renarration – a form of repetition identifiable in the work of both authors – as a deliberate narrative strategy adopted by both authors to actualise the desired semantic tearing concordant with their aesthetic praxes in English.

1. Introduction: 'grammar is in our power' (Stein, 1975, 73)
2. Grammar bound: writings on language
3. Renarration in the making of Americans and watt
4. Getting mixed: Lexical renarrations
5. Lexical renarrations and the goodbye to standard English: Stein's role in the development of Beckett's bilingual English praxis
6. 'Waste no more time trying to get it right': Beckett and Stein's 'fidelity to failure' (Beckett, 2009d, 42
2001, 145)
7. Conclusion: 'say it simply. [...] say it simplier' (Stein, 1975, 147)
References.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]