A Stylistic Approach To Gertrude Stein's Art Of Language

Gertrude Stein, who is the American novelist, poet, playwright and theorist, towers out prominently in the 20th century world literature. She is known as one of the most prolific innovators who experiments with the norms in language and genre. At the same time she does the theoretical explorations in the fields of literature and linguistics, supplying abundant theories to interpret her thoughts of writing and her art of language. Her theories on how to write prove her unique experiments on the language which she carries so pervasively and persistently through her writing career. She pushes back the boundaries of literary language and becomes so influential among the European avant-garde artists and writers that she is regarded as the core motive power towards the development of modernism and postmodernism, especially to the initial movement of modernism.As an innovator, Stein wins much attention from scholars and writers for her brave spirit to experiment on language, to criticize and even to subvert the spiritual shackle of the traditional literary language upon the human minds. But the language in most of her works was so unique in style and so difficult to understand that she was not regarded as an outstanding writer in the American literary history, as were most other modernists of her era. There have still existed academic disputes on how to evaluate and appreciate her experimental language. Although the study abroad and at home has explored her language style, the systematic research on her art of language from the perspective of stylistics is left in negligence. Since understanding her language is the key to interpret Stein, this dissertation attempts to do textual-analysis of her art of language from the perspective of stylistics. This is of significance to the interpretation and appreciation of her creative works.The dissertation aims at exploring her art of language and the stylistic values of her different genre works created in her different periods. In her early Three Lives, she experiments with the variations of repetition and creates the prolonged present tense to make her language carry the foregrounding features to present her art of language; in her middle Tender Buttons, she selects certain kinds of words, punctuation marks and syntactical patterns to defamiliarize her syntax and draw the verbal still lifes so that the language in the text appears as a free-floating entity and has self-referentiality to show her world view, which displays her art of language in the prose poem; in her late The Mother of Us All, she deviates the dialogue patterns by omitting the plot and flouting the cooperative principle; and she enforces the poetic function of the language through the phonological irregularities to manifest its musical quality, which proves her art of language in the play. In these three works which span her writing life from the 1900s to the 1940s, and which represent her achievements in fictions, prose poems and plays, it can be seen that her primary interest is language and she tends to innovate and experiment with language to explore the potentiality of language. Therefore, this dissertation attempts to cover a stylistic analysis of these three major works of Stein, as well as that of the references to the critical essays, her autobiographical writings, and her theories on how to write. This dissertation mainly contains three chapters, devoted to Stein's art of language in these three works.Chapter One deals with the quantitative foregrounding– the variations of repetition and qualitative foregrounding– the prolonged present tense in Three Lives. The variations of repetition include those of linguistic, structural and thematic repetition. Certain words, phrases and sentences accumulate all the implied and undefined meanings as they are employed every time in the varied forms. The successive appearances of these varied linguistic repetitions enforce the tones of voices and the rhythms of the language. The structural repetition makes the events turn back and reappear on themselves repeatedly to sustain the extension of the present time. The abundance of the plots of the novellas enforces the meanings of the events. The death theme is deepened in the successive three deaths of the three lives. In order to subvert the conventional concept of time, Stein violates the conventional grammar rules and mingles the past continuous tense with the past perfect continuous tense to create the prolonged present tense"been doing."She obliterates the past and future time to concentrate on the duration of the present time and highlights the value and complexity of the novellas without a sense of historical time so that she emphasizes the duration of the characters'psychological experience on certain time and neglects that on the linear time. Employing the prolonged present tense to narrate the novella is one of her narrative strategies which free her from time limit to show the conflicts, the inner world and the natural disposition of the characters. It is her art of language that demonstrates she is creative in producing a new narrative technique and she is capable to grasp the present inner activities of the characters and give the pictures of their characterizations. Stein employs these foregrounding language features to display the images of the characters and the theme of the novellas, which demonstrates her art of language and its stylistic value.Chapter Two expounds the lexical choice and syntactical defamiliarization in Tender Buttons. Stein carefully selects the words which show the sensory feelings to picture her ideal world. She is in favor of employing the polysemous quality of the nouns to explore the potentiality of language. She makes use of the periods and commas while avoiding the question marks in several sentence structures to defamiliarize her sentence patterns and impart a particular flavor to the description of the text to draw the"verbal still lifes."Her art of language manifests a mind through which a world is reflected, apprehended and conceptualized by her. She experiments on the language to explore its potentiality, which displays that she only focuses on the nature of the texts and largely overlooks the world outside the text. She intends to initiate a new artistic form and language style to surprise the reader and to question the norms in the conventional culture. The meaning is opaque in the writerly text Tender Buttons, which poses problems of interpretation and makes the reader actively engage in producing the meanings. It is her art of language in the text that reflects her unique mind style and demonstrates her ability in creating literary works. The defamiliarization of the text reflects the aesthetic value of her art of language.Chapter Three examines the deviant dialogue patterns and the phonological irregularities in The Mother of Us All. Through the analysis of the dialogue patterns of the play, this part seeks to prove that Stein rejects the conventional narrative elements such as plot and climax, blurring the boundary between different genres and transforming a play that features plot, movement, development of conflicts and their resolution into a static"scenery,"within which she foregrounds the language by destroying its referential, expressive, conative and phatic functions. She deviates the dialogue patterns and violates the cooperative principle to depict the characters and present the theme in the seemingly fragmented and meaningless dialogues. The play combines the musical quality of language and scenery together to create"a play in poetry."The phonological irregularities including the cut-up method and segmentation method display how Stein highlights the effect of the sound in the tones of voices and rhythms. The play is a kind of"memory book"of the United States in the lifetime of Susan B. Anthony whose struggle to gain the right for women to vote is like that of Stein for an artistic recognition which occupies almost all her life. She succeeds in writing"a play in poetry"and realizes her innovation to the dialogue patterns which shows her concept of play as an art of sight and sound. The stylistic deviance of the play shows her art of language and its stylistic value.Based on the stylistic analysis in these three chapters, this dissertation concludes: through the experiment with the language, i.e., the foregrounding, the defamiliarized and deviant language features, Three Lives, Tender Buttons, The Mother of Us All these three works reflect Stein's art of language and its stylistic values. The foregrounding language features are conducive to providing a more faithful representation of the characterizations, things and objects as well as the mental activities; and they are helpful to portray characters and foreground themes; taking the defamiliarization of language as a medium, she explores the potentiality of language and displays her mind style, her apprehension and concept towards the world and the language; she employs the deviant language features to depict the characterizations and reflect the theme of the play. It is in these marked language features that Stein is seeking to explore the potentiality of literary language to promote its expressive power. In this sense, Stein's experiment with the language reflects that her art of language is as the same as that of other modernist writers, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway for instance, who explored at the turn of 20th century through artistic means a new expressive form of literary creation.