Beckett and Stein

Georgina Nugent

doi:10.1017/9781108988377

Series: Elements in Beckett Studies

Beckett and Stein

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2023

Georgina Nugent

Show author details

Georgina Nugent: Affiliation:
Universität Wien, Austria

Summary

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.

Element contents

Summary
References

Get access

Keywords

Samuel Beckett Gertrude Stein influence repetition bilingualism

Type: Element
Information: Series: Elements in Beckett Studies

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108988377 [Opens in a new window]

Online ISBN: 9781108988377

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication: 25 May 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abbott, H. Porter (2010), ‘Garden Paths and Ineffable Effects: Abandoning Representation in Literature and Film’, in Adalma, Frederick Luis (ed.), Towards a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts, Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 205–26.Google Scholar

Ackerley, C. J. (2010), Obscure Locks, Simple Keys: The Annotated Watt, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar

Astbury, Helen (2001), ‘How to Do Things with Syntax: Beckett’s Binary-Turned Sentences in French and Their Translation into English’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 11, pp. 446–53.Google Scholar

Banfield, Ann (1982), Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction, London: Routledge.Google Scholar

Banfield, Ann (2003), ‘Beckett’s Tattered Syntax’, Representations, 84:1, pp. 6–29.Google Scholar

Beckett, Samuel (2001), Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Cohn, Ruby, London: John Calder.Google Scholar

Beckett, Samuel (2009a), Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirrings Still, ed. Hulle, Dirk Van, London: Faber and Faber.Google Scholar

Beckett, Samuel (2009b), How It Is, ed. O’Reilly, Édouard Magessa, London: Faber and Faber.Google Scholar

Beckett, Samuel (2009c), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. I: 1929–1940, ed. Fehsenfeld, Martha Dow, Overbeck, Lois More, Craig, George and Gunn, Dan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Beckett, Samuel (2009d), Molloy, ed. Shane Weller, London: Faber and Faber.Google Scholar

Beckett, Samuel (2009e), Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, 1950–1976, ed. Nixon, Mark, London: Faber and Faber.Google Scholar

Beckett, Samuel (2009f), Watt, ed. Ackerley, C. J., London: Faber and Faber.Google Scholar

Beckett, Samuel (2010), The Unnamable, ed. Connor, Steven, London: Faber and Faber.Google Scholar

Beer, Ann (1985) ‘Watt, Knott and Beckett’s Bilingualism’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 10, pp. 37–75.Google Scholar

Beer, Ann (1994), ‘Beckett’s Bilingualism’, in Pilling, John (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 209–21.Google Scholar

Carville, Conor (2018), ‘Late and Belated Modernism: Duchamp … Stein . Feininger … Beckett’, in Beloborodova, Olga, Van Hulle, Dirk and Verhulst, Pim (eds), Beckett and Modernism, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 53–67.Google Scholar

Clément, Bruno (2007), ‘Logique du bilinguisme’, in Montini, Chiara, ‘La bataille du soliloque’: Genèse de la poétique bilingue de Samuel Beckett (1929–1946), Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 13–17.Google Scholar

Cohn, Ruby (1961), ‘Samuel Beckett: Self-Translator’, PMLA, 76, pp. 613–21.Google Scholar

Cohn, Ruby (1962), Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar

Cohn, Ruby (2001), ‘Foreword’, in Beckett, Samuel, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Cohn, Ruby, London: John Calder, pp. 7–16.Google Scholar

Connor, Steven (1988), Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, Text, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar

Connor, Steven (1989), ‘Traduttore, traditore: Samuel Beckett’s Translation of Mercier et Camier’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 11–12, pp. 27–46.Google Scholar

Cordingley, Anthony (2007), ‘Beckett and “l’ordre naturel”: The Universal Grammar of Comment c’est/How It Is’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 18:1, pp. 185–99.Google Scholar

Cordingley, Anthony, and Montini, Chiara (2015), ‘Genetic Translation Studies: An Emerging Discipline’, Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series: Themes in Translation Studies, 14. https://doi.org/10.52034/lanstts.v14i0.399. [Accessed 27 September 2021].Google Scholar

Coupland, Douglas (1996), Polaroids from the Dead, London: Flamingo.Google Scholar

Deeney, John F. (2013), ‘Location, Location, Location: Narrative and Blankness in Recent British Drama’, in Shirley, David and Turner, Jane (eds), Performing Narrative: Narration, ‘Denarration’, Fracture and Absence in Contemporary Performance Practice, Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University, pp. 1–11.Google Scholar

Emonds, Joseph (2001), Lexicon and Grammar: The English Syntacticon, Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.Google Scholar

Federman, Raymond (1987), ‘The Writer As Self-Translator’, in Friedman, Alan, Rossman, Charles and Sherzer, Dina (eds), Beckett Translating/Translating Beckett, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 7–16.Google Scholar

Fitch, Brian T. (1988), Beckett and Babel: An Investigation into the Status of the Bilingual Work, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar

Forsyth, Mark (2013), The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase, London: Icon Books.Google Scholar

Germoni, Karine (2014), ‘Play/Comédie, Come and Go/Va-et-vient, Footfalls/Pas de Beckett; ou, Le va-et-vient de la ponctuation entre deux langues’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 26, pp. 283–98.Google Scholar

Germoni, Karine, and Sardin, Pascale (2012), ‘Tensions of the In-Between: Rhythm, Tonelessness and Lyricism in Fin de partie/Endgame’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 24, pp. 335–50.Google Scholar

Gubar, Susan (2000), Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century, New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar

Hobhouse, Janet, (1975), Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein, London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson.Google Scholar

Joyce, James (2007), Ulysses, ed. Gabler, Hans Walter, with Steppe, Wolfhard and Melchior, Claus, afterword by Groden, Michael, London: The Bodley Head.Google Scholar

Kawin, Bruce F. (1972), Telling It Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar

Kellner, Bruce (ed.) (1988), A Gertrude Stein Companion: Content with the Example, New York: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar

Kennedy, Seán (2011), ‘Beckett Publishing in Ireland 1929–1956’, in Nixon, Mark (ed.), Publishing Samuel Beckett, London: The British Library, pp. 57–71.Google Scholar

Knowlson, James (1997), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar

Knowlson, James, with Haynes, John (2003), Images of Beckett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Krance, Charles (ed.) (1993), Company/Compagnie and A Piece of Monologue/Solo: A Bilingual Variorum Edition, New York: Garland.Google Scholar

Krance, Charles (ed.) (1996), Samuel Beckett’s Mal vu mal dit/Ill seen ill said: A Bilingual, Evolutionary, and Synoptic Variorum Edition, New York: Garland.Google Scholar

Lodge, David (1977), The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature, London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar

Montini, Chiara (2007), ‘La bataille du soliloque’: Genèse de la poétique bilingue de Samuel Beckett (1929–1946), Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar

Montini, Chiara (2012), ‘L’œuvre sans original: du brouillon à l’autotraduction et retour’, in Littérature, 167, pp. 78–89.Google Scholar

Mooney, Sinéad (2010), ‘Beckett in English and French’, in Gontarski, S. E. (ed.), A Companion to Samuel Beckett, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 196–208.Google Scholar

Mooney, Sinéad (2011), A Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and Translation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar

‘New York Passenger Lists, 1820–1891’, database with images, 420 – 15 Sep 1879–5 Nov 1879, image 335 of 1171; citing National Archives and Records Administration microfilm publication M237, National Archives, Washington DC. www.familysearch.org.Google Scholar

Nguyen, Tram (2013), Porosities: Aesthetic Correlations between Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujhourd’hui, 25, pp. 45–57.Google Scholar

Nixon, Mark (2007), ‘Beckett Publishing/Publishing Beckett in the 1930s’, Variants: Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship, 6, pp. 209–19.Google Scholar

Nixon, Mark (2011), Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, London: Continuum.Google Scholar

Nugent-Folan, Georgina (2013), ‘“Ill Buttoned”: Comparing the Representation of Objects in Samuel Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said and Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 22:1, pp. 54–82.Google Scholar

Nugent-Folan, Georgina (2015), ‘Personal Apperception: Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, and Paul Cézanne’s La Montagne Saint Victoire’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujhourd’hui, 27:1, pp. 87–101.Google Scholar

Nugent-Folan, Georgina (2016), ‘“Say It Simply […] Say It Simplier”: Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein’s Aesthetics of Writing Worser’, PhD diss, University of Dublin, Trinity College.Google Scholar

Nugent-Folan, Georgina (2022), ‘Self Re-writing and Self Un-writing: Reconsidering Gertrude Stein’s Marginalisation in Discussions of Samuel Beckett’s Autographic Writing’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujhourd’hui, 34:1, pp. 163–7.Google Scholar

Padgette, Paul (1971), ‘Letter in Response to “A Very Difficult Author, from April 8, 1971”’, New York Review of Books, 1 July. http://bit.ly/3mGzwb1 [Accessed 27 September 2021].Google Scholar

Perloff, Marjorie (1999), The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar

Perloff, Marjorie (2002), 21st-Century Modernism: The ‘New’ Poetics, Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar

Pilling, John, and Lawlor, Seán (2011), ‘Beckett in Transition’, in Nixon, Mark (ed.), Publishing Samuel Beckett, London: The British Library, pp. 83–95.Google Scholar

Powell, Joshua (2018), ‘Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett and the Aesthetics of Inattention’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 30:2, pp. 239–52.Google Scholar

Richardson, Brian (2001), ‘Denarration in Fiction: Erasing the Story in Beckett and Others’, Narrative, 9:2, pp. 168–75.Google Scholar

Sardin, Pascale (2015), ‘Reading and Interpreting Variants in Come and Go, Va-et-vient and Kommen und Gehen’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 24:1, pp. 75–86.Google Scholar

Sardin-Damestoy, Pascale (2002), Samuel Beckett auto-traducteur ou l’art de ‘l’empêchement’: lecture bilingue et génétique des textes courts auto-traduits (1946–1980), Arras: Artois Presses Universtité.Google Scholar

Satiat, Nadine (2010), Gertrude Stein, Flammarion.Google Scholar

Scheiner, Corrine (2013), ‘Self-Translation’, in Uhlmann, Anthony (ed.), Samuel Beckett in Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 370–80.Google Scholar

Schuster, Joshua (2011), ‘The Making of “Tender Buttons”: Gertrude Stein’s Subjects, Objects, and the Illegible’, Jacket 2, https://jacket2.org/article/making-tender-buttons [Accessed 27 September 21].Google Scholar

Shirley, David, and Turner, Jane (eds) (2013), Performing Narrative: Narration, ‘Denarration’, Fracture and Absence in Contemporary Performance Practice, Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University.Google Scholar

Slote, Sam (2011), ‘Continuing the End: Variation between Beckett’s French and English Prose Works’, in Nixon, Mark (ed.), Publishing Samuel Beckett, London: The British Library, pp. 205–18.Google Scholar

Slote, Sam (2015), “Bilingual Beckett: Beyond the Linguistic Turn,” in Van Hulle, Dirk (ed.), The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 114–25.Google Scholar

Spitzer, Leo (1972), ‘Une habitude de style, le rappel chez Celine’, Cahier de l’Herne: Celine, Paris: Heme-Livre de Poche, pp. 257–73.Google Scholar

Stacey, Stephen (2013), ‘Translating for Sense: Samuel Beckett’s writing in English, French and English’, Paper presented at ‘Samuel Beckett and the “State” of Ireland III’, University College Dublin, 3 August.Google Scholar

Stacey, Stephen (2018), ‘Beckett and French, 1906–1946: A Study’, PhD diss, University of Dublin, Trinity College.Google Scholar

Stein, Gertrude (1971), ‘A Transatlantic Interview–1946’, in Hass, Robert Bartlett (ed.), A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, pp. 11–35.Google Scholar

Stein, Gertrude (1973), Everybody’s Autobiography, New York: Vintage.Google Scholar

Stein, Gertrude (1975), How to Write, New York: Dover.Google Scholar

Stein, Gertrude (1984), Wars I Have Seen, New York: Random House.Google Scholar

Stein, Gertrude (1990), Three Lives, New York: Penguin.Google Scholar

Stein, Gertrude (1993), Geography and Plays, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar

Stein, Gertrude (1995), The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress, London: Dalkey Archive.Google Scholar

Stein, Gertrude (1996), A Stein Reader, ed. with an introduction by Ulla, E. Dydo, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar

Stein, Gertrude (1998), Writings 1932–1946, New York: Library of America.Google Scholar

Stein, Gertrude (2001), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, London: Penguin.Google Scholar

Stein, Gertrude (2003), Paris, France, London: Peter Owen.Google Scholar

Stein, Gertrude (2004), Look At Me Now and Here I Am: Selected Works 1911–1945, ed. Meyerowitz, Patricia, London: Peter Owen.Google Scholar

Stein, Gertrude (2010), Narration, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar

Stein, Gertrude (2014), Tender Buttons: The Corrected Centennial Edition, San Francisco: City Lights.Google Scholar

Taylor-Batty, Juliet (2013), Multilingualism in Modernist Fiction, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar

The Oxford English Dictionary (2021), Third Edition. http://dictionary.oed.com.Google Scholar

Van Hulle, Dirk (2014), ‘The Obidil and the Man of Glass: Denarration, Genesis and Cognition in Beckett’s Molloy, Malone meurt/Malone Dies and L’innommable/The Unnamable’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 26:1, pp. 25–39.Google Scholar

Van Hulle, Dirk, and Nixon, Mark (2013), Samuel Beckett’s Library, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Van Hulle, Dirk, and Weller, Shane (2014), The Making of Samuel Beckett’s L’innommable/The Unnamable. The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project 02, London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar

Weller, Shane (2021), Samuel Beckett and Cultural Nationalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Wilson, Robert A. (1974), Gertrude Stein: A Bibliography, New York: Phoenix Bookshop.Google Scholar

Wineapple, Brenda (2008), Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar

Element contents

Beckett and Stein

Summary

Keywords

Access options

References

Save element to Kindle

Save element to Dropbox

Save element to Google Drive