Narrating the everyday: iterative narration in Gertrude Stein's Three Lives and Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore Gertrude Stein's unconventional use of “iterative” narration, Gérard Genette's term for passages that narrate habitual or recurring action, as a way to represent the repetitious life patterns of the working-class women in Three Lives (1909). While less frequently discussed than Stein's syntactical repetitions, I argue that Stein's use of the iterative is an essential aspect of her revolutionary modernist aesthetics; whereas Genette writes that iterative passages are typically “functionally subordinate” to individually narrated events, Three Lives foregrounds the iterative and thus insists on the importance of the seemingly trivial day-to-day experiences that make up Stein's characters’ lives. Following my examination of iterative narration within Three Lives, I turn to Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic (2011), positing that Otsuka's contemporary novel embodies the spirit of Stein's modernism through its own harnessing of iterative narration as a distinctly feminist literary form.