"Who can shave an egg?": Beckett, Mallarmé, and Foreign Tongues.

The article discusses the use of foreign languages by authors, specifically Samuel Beckett and Stephane Mallarme. Beckett used the French language to write his work "Premier Amour," taking advantage of special syntactical rules and connotations to add meaning and a new layer of theatricality to the book. Mallarme, an Irishman, was a rabid student of English, and became so involved in the aesthetics and semantics of the language that he published three works on the language. The author analyzes the effects of these authors' decisions to use a foreign language when writing.