Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens

273 pages

English

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Vanderbilt University Press - Dana Cairns Watson

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273 pages

English

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In this provocative study, Dana Cairns Watson traces Gertrude Stein's growing fascination with the cognitive and political ramifications of conversation and how that interest influenced her writing over the course of her career. No book in recent decades has illuminated so many of Stein's works so extensively--from the early fiction of The Making of Americans to the poetry of Tender Buttons to her opera libretto The Mother of Us All.

Seeking to sustain Stein's lively, pleasant, populist spirit, Watson shows how the writer's playful entanglement of sight and sound--of silent reading and social speaking--reveals the crucial ambiguity by which reading and conversation build communities of meaning, and thus form not only personal relationships but also our very selves and the larger political structures we inhabit. Stein reminds us that the residual properties of words and the implications behind the give-and-take of ordinary conversation offer alternatives to linear structures of social order, alternatives especially precious in times of political oppression. For example, her novels Mrs. Reynolds and Brewsie and Willie, both written in embattled Vichy France, contemplate the speech patterns of totalitarian leaders and the ways in which everyday discourse might capitulate to--or resist--such verbal tyranny.

Like recent theorists, Stein recognized the repressiveness of conventional order--carried in language and thus in thought and social organization--but as Watson persuasively shows, she also insisted that the free will of individuals can persist in language and enable change. In the play of literary aesthetics, Stein saw a liberating force.

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American

Literature

Literary Criticism

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Publié par	Vanderbilt University Press
Date de parution	21 janvier 2005
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780826591845
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1000€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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GERTRUDESTEINAND n THE ESSENCE OFWHAT HAPPENS

D a n a C a i r n s W a t s o n

Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens

GERTRUDE STEIN AND THE ESSENCE OF WHAT HAPPENS

D A N A C A I R N S W A T S O N

V A N D E R B I L T U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S SNashville n

This book is printed on acidfree paper. Manufactured in the United States of America

Design by Gary Gore

Frontispiece courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. Collection 2108, Gilbert Harrison Collection of Material relating to Gertrude Stein, box 4 folder 16: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas having tea.

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Watson, Dana Cairns, 1966 Gertrude Stein and the essence of what happens / Dana Cairns Watson.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn0826514626 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn0826514634 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Stein, Gertrude, 18741946—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Interpersonal communication in literature. 3. Meaning (Philosophy) in literature. 4. Conversation in literature. 5. Speech in literature. 6. Dialogue. I. Title. ps3537.t323Z96 2004 818.’5209—dc22 2003027602

For Rob, a credit to the species

Acknowledgments

CONTENTS

Introduction: “Announce what you see”

Talking and Listening in Stein’s Early Life and Works

“Interested in the mere workings of the machinery” 15 The Potential Remaking of Americans, or Revising America 18 Sound Writing 30 A Sensible Education 33

Modifying the Mind: William James andTender Buttons

Tender ButtonsDisturb a Center: Questioning Our Rhetorical Religion 44

Conversational Relations inGeography and Plays

Recognizing the Real in a Collage of Words and Phrases 57 Food and Talk 62 The Motivations behindWhat Happened65 What Can Happen When People Talk and Read 68 Conversation Patterning as the Essence of What Happens 75 Some Discoveries: Subtle Antagonism, or Free Play in Language 79 Repairing Friendship in “Susie Asado”83 Onesided Conversations with Shakespeare, or Tricked by Talk 86

Talk in the Thirties: In the Present, with the Past

Starting Conversations in America 90 What They Might Have Talked About 96 Stein and Einstein 98 The Closed American Mind 101 Writing and Speaking in Stein’s Quirky Deﬁning 103 Learning about Listening through Reading Borrow and Smollett 110 Stein’s Reading and Writing of “Rights” and “Rites” 113

Talking Boundaries into Thresholds inIda

“Who is any one said the wife to the husband” 124 Fame and the Public: Alienation from the Self 127 The Self and Its Trappings 131 Stein at Night Means Delight 133 Standing in the Window 138 Also Known As, or The Metaphor of Sight 141 The Death of Conversation, or The Monologue of Death 144 Human Intertextuality 147

Expressing a State of Mind: Conversation, Politics, and Individuality inMrs. ReynoldsandBrewsie and Willie

Talking under an Angel Harper Cloud 153 “A queer state of living,” or Resistance through Reticulation and Local Area Networks 162 Getting Together and Thinking inBrewsie and Willie170 YesandNo “Jobmen” 177 Stein “ain’t so phony as she sounds” 185 Real Ideas 191

Conclusions: Feminine Endings

“The Woman Who Changed the Mind of a Nation” 193 Sublime Amalgamations 199

Notes Bibliography News Articles Relevant to Stein’s 1934–1935 Lecture Tour Index

viii

Contents

119

149

193

205 235 247 251

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Stephen Yenser for introducing me to Gertrude Stein and her crit ics in 1986, for daring me to develop instructions for reading Stein, and for making me pay attention to every word—Stein’s, as well as my own. Thanks to Martha Banta for pointing out that my sudden interest in conversation analysis—as inspired by Michael Moerman and Edith Wharton—might be worth pursuing. Thanks to John Heritage for welcoming this novice into the ﬁeld of conversation analysis, and for being willing to take on Stein at the same time. Thanks to all of them, as well as Jayne Lewis, for encouraging me with praise, challenges, and always more questions and wordplay. Thanks to Stein’s readers and critics for inspiring me to think in ways I never imagined, and to Gilbert Harrison’s generous donation to UCLA’s Special Collections. Thanks to the warm and helpful people who work there, especially Jeffrey Rankin, for enabling me to read Stein’s outofprint works (many of which are now in print), gaze at photographs, and ﬁnger— among other memorabilia—one of her small gloves. Thanks to the many students who hesitatingly started into a Stein work and were openminded and creative enough to notice that something won derfully interesting was happening. These include Allison Raskin, Jake Bern, Aaron Dover, carine risley, Bryan Kocol, Suzanne Karpilovsky, and Tessa Ingersoll. Thanks even to some of the stubborn ones—Mike Hawes and Eugene Pino, for example—who kept asking for more reasons that they should come to appreciate Stein, too. To Bob Hiller, my eighthgrade American history teacher at Stanley School, thanks for teaching out of discontinued textbooks which showed that imperfect people can accomplish great things, and for truly thinking while he talked to us thirteenyearolds. Thanks and love to my parents, Gene and Patty Cairns, for every thing. Thanks and love to Emma Cairns Watson for her patience and her sweet kisses from the doorway of the study. Thanks for singing: “I am Rose my eyes are blue / I am Rose and who are you / I am Rose and when I sing /

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