Gertrude Stein Oyunlarında Karşı-Anlatı Stratejileri

Abstract

When theatre in general is taken into consideration, two pioneers particularly stand out in the Historical Avant-Garde period and they can be seen as intellectual ancestors of the 1970s: Antonin Artaud from Continental Europe who objected to the “rational word” logos and therefore to the text; and Gertrude Stein from the American continent who tried to reject logos which fastened to Western theatre with a tight belt without negating text, while writing her first play What Happened. In experimental theatre attempts of the 1970s, the text was not totally rejected: in the experimental theatre from Robert Wilson to Richard Foreman or in the new-textuality from Sarah Kane to Martin Crimp, the density of the word and writing was altered; thus, a hybridization that exceeded both the theatre and performance classic definitions was revealed. The aim of this article is to exemplify the anti-narrative strategies of Gertrude Stein’s plays, in which she tried to remove the “sequence-of-events” of the absolute condition of the conventional narrative definition instead of negating text.