Gertrude Stein

Tender Buttons (1914)

Puns frequently on conventions of femininity/lesbian sexuality; its organizing structure of objects, food and rooms elevates conventionally female domestic realms to the level of poetic and philosophical seriousness.

"A Petticoat"/"In Between"

asserts pleasure and value in lesbian love/women-centered life

Unfamiliar word sequences so as to subvert fixed hierarchies and assumptions of grammar, verse, punctuation and logic, instead proceeding by patterns of association, image, and sound. Emphasizing sound and rhythm, association.

automatic writing from William James

"Portraits of rooms and food and everything because there I could avoid this difficulty of suggesting remembering more easily...than if I were to describe human beings."

Attacking denotations of words: while the individual elements of her sentences were familiar, their significance as a whole had been stripped away. She repeated words, recast them, rhymed them, and strung them together in unusual combinations. She emphasized their musical qualities, favoring sound over sense.

Willful incoherence. The reader is forced to question the meanings of words, to become reacquainted with a language that Stein thought had become dulled by long use.

"not unordered not resembling"

Tactility

ever-present now

no memory

Art, Cubism

"they too had to be certain that looking was not confusing itself with remembering...remembering with them takes the form of suggesting in their painting in place of having actually created the thing in itself that they are painting..."

Influential:

Radically disjunctive collage, her loosening of the word from the moorings of signification, her sense of language as concrete, a thing of palpable sound and visual space

makes familiar words seem like strangers, and makes some words more intimate, "consists of a rebuilding, an entire new recasting of life, in the city of words."

Finding a form a writing that preserves the sense of vagueness and mutability she recognizes in the natural world. Without naming the body in either graphic or conventionally erotic terms, she conveys her sensual experience through her tender reiteration of certain talismanic words--words and phrases that gain their power through insistence, through playful echoing and reversal (Bishop w/ Stein)

a way of happening

tentative

Moore vs. Stein

instructive for thinking about feminism in this era in its range of intersections with female poets

Stein--openly hostile to women's movement, no interest in public and institutional policies or reform

Like Moore, Stein committed to gender neutrality and convinced that women's abilities equalled men.