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A critical guide to the poetics and philosophy of Gertrude Stein

Stein, Gertrude, --- Staĭn, Gertruda, --- Stein, Gertruda, --- Criticism and interpretation.

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GBS_insertPreviewButtonPopup('ISBN:9780748611980);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 FeaturesA scholarly study of a writer who is receiving ever-increasing critical attentionThe first major scholarly study to deal with Gertrude Stein's central claim to being a geniusOffers new insight into debates over modernism, mass culture, and postmodernismCombines a historical approach with a theoretical reading inflected by postmodern thinkingOriginal, theoretically informed and consistently well-written.Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of 'Genius' was winner of the Choice Outstanding Academic Title award in 2001."

Genius in literature. --- Modernism (Literature) --- Stein, Gertrude, --- Staĭn, Gertruda, --- Stein, Gertruda, --- Criticism and interpretation.

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Authors, American --- Americans --- History --- Stein, Gertrude, --- Toklas, Alice B. --- Staĭn, Gertruda, --- Stein, Gertruda, --- Paris (France) --- Intellectual life

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"The central premise of Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric is that Gertrude Stein can and should be recognized as one of the twentieth century's preeminent rhetoricians, ever so much as a literary modernist and innovator. The relationship between rhetorical studies and literary studies remains a vexed one, due in part to rhetoric's contemporary affiliation with composition, rendering its institutional position separate from, if not subordinate to, the study of literature. Gertrude Stein's writing recognizes no such distinctions, making it ripe for a fresh analytical lens. Sharon J. Kirsch positions Gertrude Stein--a iconic and canonical figure of early literary modernism--as a major twentieth-century rhetorician whose conception of language challenges, satirizes, and reinvents the five classical canons of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. More than a literary figure or even a premier modernist or proto-postmodernist innovator, as she is so often read, Stein's interest in language, in all its possible forms, transcends modern disciplinary boundaries and remains grounded in rhetorical culture"-- "Gertrude Stein is recognized as an iconic and canonical literary modernist. In Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric, Sharon J. Kirsch broadens our understanding of Stein's influence to include her impact on the field of rhetoric. For humanities scholars as well as popular audiences, the relationship between rhetoric and literature remains vexed, in part due to rhetoric's contemporary affiliation with composition, which makes it separate from, if not subordinate to, the study of literature. Gertrude Stein recognized no such separation, and this disciplinary policing of the study of English has diminished our understanding of her work, Kirsch argues. Stein's career unfolded at the crossroads of literary composition and rhetorical theory, a site where she alternately challenged, satirized, and reinvented the five classical canons of rhetoric-invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery-even as she invented new trajectories of literary experimentation. Kirsch follows Stein from her days studying composition and philosophy at Harvard through her expatriate years in France, fame in the 1930's, and experience of the Second World War. She frames Stein's explorations of language as an inventive poetics that reconceived practices and theories of rhetorical invention during a period that saw the rise of literary studies and the decline of rhetorical studies. Through careful readings of canonical and lesser-known works, Kirsch offers a convincing critical portrait of Stein as a Sophistic provocateur who reinvented the canons by making a productive mess of canonical rhetoric and modernist categories of thought. Readers will find much of interest in Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric. Kirsch offers myriad insights to scholars of Stein, to those interested in the interdisciplinary intersections of literature, rhetoric, and philosophy, as well as to scholars and students in the field of rhetoric and communication studies. Positioning Stein as a major twentieth-century rhetorical theorist is particularly timely given increasing interest in historical and theoretical resonances between rhetoric and poetics and given the continued lack of recognition for women theorists in rhetorical studies. "--

LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Rhetoric. --- LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General. --- Stein, Gertrude, --- Staĭn, Gertruda, --- Stein, Gertruda, --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Language arts & disciplines --- Literary criticism --- Rhetorik. --- Rhetoric. --- American --- General.

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This thoughtful and sophisticated text views Gertrude Stein's life and writings through the lens of transgender theory. Reframing earlier scholarship that falsely assumes that Stein's masculinity was a misogynist manifestation of self-hatred, Chris Coffman argues that her gender was transmasculine and affirms her masculinity as a vital force in her life and work. This work uses Stein's writings - and others' literary and visual texts about her - to illuminate the ways her transmasculinity was formed through her relationship with her feminine partner, Alice B. Toklas, and through her masculine homosocial bonds with modernist figures such as Jane Heap, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and Carl Van Vechten.

Gender identity in literature. --- Masculinity in literature. --- Masculinity (Psychology) in literature --- Stein, Gertrude, --- Staĭn, Gertruda, --- Stein, Gertruda, --- Criticism and interpretation.