| Sumario: | Gertrude Stein frequently uses number words, and critics have used mathematical frameworks to describe her writing, especially her use of repetition. Across her oeuvre, Stein manipulates the semantic and syntactic rules of English, and she equally manipulates numbers. Instead of identifying quantities, Stein's number words, and her attention to counting, illustrate the conceptual and semiotic trouble of conveying mathematics in language. In Tender Buttons (1914) and "An Instant Answer or A Hundred Prominent Men" (1928), Stein's numbers are grammatical and phenomenological; they are not instances of counting or of the countable. Her theory of repetition, in fact, disallows countability. To count her repetitions and to treat her numbers as static is to subscribe to the social phenomenon of authority that is typically given to numbers rather than to engage number words as they uniquely act in Stein's poetic texts.
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