Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of 'Genius'

Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of 'Genius' PDF Author: Barbara Will
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748699341
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Gertrude Stein frequently called herself a genius, but what did this term really mean for her? Stein's claims to genius are legendary, appearing frequently throughout her texts and public lectures. Were they the signs of excessive egotism, of desperate self-advertisement, or of something else entirely? This book examines the centrality and the specificity of the idea of 'genius' to Stein's work and to the aesthetic ideals and contradictory intellectual affiliations of high modernism in general. Through a chronological reading, it maps Stein's move from an early investment in an essential and essentializing notion of 'genius' to her later use of the term to describe an anti-essentialist, democratic textual process. It considers how this revisionary idea of 'genius' came to correspond with Stein's identification of herself as Jewish, queer and American. And it ends with Stein's seemingly paradoxical decision to call a text about being a genius in America, Everybody's Autobiography. Drawing upon a wide range of literary theory, cultural criticism and historical evidence, and offering new readings of previously unexamined texts by Stein, Barbara Will challenges received understandings of Stein's claims to 'genius' and of modernist literary hermeticism by reconceptualising the textual practice of this exemplary modernist writer.Key Features:*A scholarly study of a writer who is receiving ever-increasing critical attention*The first major scholarly study to deal with Gertrude Stein's central claim to being a genius*Offers new insight into debates over modernism, mass culture, and postmodernism*Combines a historical approach with a theoretical reading inflected by postmodern thinking*Original, theoretically informed and consistently well-writtenGertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of 'Genius' was winner of the Choice Outstanding Academic Title award in 2001.

Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of 'Genius'

Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of 'Genius' PDF Author: Barbara Will
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748699341
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Gertrude Stein frequently called herself a genius, but what did this term really mean for her? Stein's claims to genius are legendary, appearing frequently throughout her texts and public lectures. Were they the signs of excessive egotism, of desperate self-advertisement, or of something else entirely? This book examines the centrality and the specificity of the idea of 'genius' to Stein's work and to the aesthetic ideals and contradictory intellectual affiliations of high modernism in general. Through a chronological reading, it maps Stein's move from an early investment in an essential and essentializing notion of 'genius' to her later use of the term to describe an anti-essentialist, democratic textual process. It considers how this revisionary idea of 'genius' came to correspond with Stein's identification of herself as Jewish, queer and American. And it ends with Stein's seemingly paradoxical decision to call a text about being a genius in America, Everybody's Autobiography. Drawing upon a wide range of literary theory, cultural criticism and historical evidence, and offering new readings of previously unexamined texts by Stein, Barbara Will challenges received understandings of Stein's claims to 'genius' and of modernist literary hermeticism by reconceptualising the textual practice of this exemplary modernist writer.Key Features:*A scholarly study of a writer who is receiving ever-increasing critical attention*The first major scholarly study to deal with Gertrude Stein's central claim to being a genius*Offers new insight into debates over modernism, mass culture, and postmodernism*Combines a historical approach with a theoretical reading inflected by postmodern thinking*Original, theoretically informed and consistently well-writtenGertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of 'Genius' was winner of the Choice Outstanding Academic Title award in 2001.

Unlikely Collaboration

Unlikely Collaboration PDF Author: Barbara Will
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231152639
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
From 1941 to 1943, the Jewish American writer and avant-garde icon Gertrude Stein translated for an American audience thirty-two speeches in which Marshal Philippe Petain, head of state for the collaborationist Vichy government, outlined the Vichy policy barring Jews and other "foreign elements" from the public sphere while calling for France to reconcile with its Nazi occupiers. Why and under what circumstances would Stein undertake such a project? The answers lie in Stein's link to the man at the core of this controversy: Bernard Faÿ, her apparent Vichy protector. Barbara Will outlines the formative powers of this relationship, treating their interaction as a case study of intellectual life during wartime France and an indication of America's place in the Vichy imagination.

Gertrude Stein in Europe

Gertrude Stein in Europe PDF Author: Sarah Posman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474242294
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Although often hailed as a 'quintessentially American' writer, the modernist poet, novelist and playwright Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) spent most of her life in France. With chapters written by leading international scholars, Gertrude Stein in Europe is the first sustained exploration of the European artistic and intellectual networks in which Stein's work was first developed and circulated. Along the way, the book investigates the European contexts of Stein's writing, how her own work intersected with European thought, including phenomenology and the vitalist work of Henri Bergson, and ultimately how it was received by scholars and artists across the continent. Gertrude Stein in Europe opens up new perspectives on Stein as a writer and on the centrality of artistic and intellectual networks to European modernism.

The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder

The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder PDF Author: Gertrude Stein
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300067743
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
Letters trace the friendship between Stein and Wilder from late 1934 until Stein's death in 1946

Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein PDF Author: Ulla E. Dydo
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810125269
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 704

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Book Description
The definitive book on Gertrude Stein

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas PDF Author: Gertrude Stein
Publisher: Blurb
ISBN: 9781388227289
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was written in 1933 by Gertrude Stein in the guise of an autobiography authored by Alice B. Toklas, who was her lover. It is a fascinating insight into the art scene in Paris as the couple were friends with Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. They begin the war years in England but return to France, volunteering for the American Fund for the French Wounded, driving around France, helping the wounded and homeless. After the war Gertrude has an argument with T. S. Eliot after he finds one of her writings inappropriate. They become friends with Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. It was written to make money and was indeed a commercial success. However, it attracted criticism, especially from those who appeared in the book and didn't like the way they were depicted.

Gertrude Stein and the Making of Jewish Modernism

Gertrude Stein and the Making of Jewish Modernism PDF Author: Amy Feinstein
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813072395
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Challenging the assumption that modernist writer Gertrude Stein seldom integrated her Jewish identity and heritage into her work, this book uncovers Stein’s constant and varied writing about Jewish topics throughout her career. Amy Feinstein argues that Judaism was central to Stein’s ideas about modernity, showing how Stein connects the modernist era to the Jewish experience.  Combing through Stein’s scholastic writings, drafting notebooks, and literary works, Feinstein analyzes references to Judaism that have puzzled scholars. She reveals the never-before-discussed influence of Matthew Arnold as well as a hidden Jewish framework in Stein’s epic novel The Making of Americans. In Stein’s experimental “voices” poems, Feinstein identifies an explicitly Jewish vocabulary that expresses themes of marriage, nationalism, and Zionism. She also shows how Wars I Have Seen, written in Vichy France during World War II, compares the experience of wartime occupation with the historic persecution of Jews.  Affirming the importance of Jewish identity and modernist style to Gertrude Stein’s legacy as a writer, this book radically changes the way we read and appreciate Stein’s work.

Gender in Modernism

Gender in Modernism PDF Author: Bonnie Kime Scott
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252074181
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 896

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Book Description
Grouped into 21 thematic sections, this collection provides theoretical introductions to the primary texts provided by the scholars who have taken the lead in pushing both modernism and gender in different directions. It provides an understanding of the complex intersections of gender with an array of social identifications.

Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies

Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies PDF Author: Sandeep Parmar
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 144117320X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Mina Loy is recognised today as one of the most innovative modernist poets, numbering Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, Djuna Barnes and T.S. Eliot amongst her admirers. Drawing on substantial new archival research, this book challenges the existing critical myth of Loy as a 'modern woman' through an analysis of her unpublished autobiographical prose. Mina Loy's Autobiographies explores this major twentieth century writer's ideas about the 'modern' and how they apply to the 'modernist' writer-based on her engagement with twentieth-century avant-garde aesthetics-and charts how Loy herself uniquely defined modernity in her essays on literature and art. Sandeep Parmar here shows how, ultimately, Loy's autobiographies extend the modernist project by rejecting earlier impressions of avant-garde futurity and newness in favour of a 'late modernist' aesthetic, one that is more pessimistic, inward and interested in the fragmentary interplay between the past and present.

Picasso

Picasso PDF Author: Gertrude Stein
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 47

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Book Description
As the butch doyenne of the Parisian Salons, Gertrude Stein captures the heart of Picasso in that context and gives insights on how Picasso worked as an artist and why Cubism came about in the way that it did. Also, this portrait of Picasso contains pretty clear description of Cubism and reveals a lot about relationship between Picasso and Stein without revealing a lot of actual events in either of their lives. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright and art collector, best known for Three Lives, The Making of Americans and Tender Buttons. Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. Picasso and Cubism were an important influence on Stein's writing. Her works are compared to James Joyce's Ulysses and to Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.