The Geographical History of America

The Geographical History of America
Author: Gertrude Stein
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2013-04-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0307824438

First published in 1936, The Geographical History of America compiles prose pieces, dialogues, philosophical meditations, and playlets by one of the century's most influential writers. In this work, Stein sets forth her view of the human mind: what it is, how it works, and how it is different from - and more interesting than - human nature.

Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright

Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright
Author: M. Lynn Weiss
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2009-11-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 162846884X

After the Second World War, Gertrude Stein asked a friend's support in securing a visa for Richard Wright to visit Paris. “I've got to help him,” she said. “You see, we are both members of a minority group.” The brief, little-noted friendship of Stein and Wright began in 1945 with a letter. Over the next fifteen months, the two kept up a lively correspondence which culminated in Wright's visit to Paris in May 1946 and ended with Stein's death a few months later. Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright began their careers as marginals within marginalized groups, and their desire to live peacefully in unorthodox marriages led them away from America and into permanent exile in France. Still, the obvious differences between them—in class, ethnic and racial origins, and in artistic expression—beg the question: What was there to talk about? This question opens a window onto each writer's meditations on the influence of racial, ethnic, national origins on the formation of identity in a modern and post-modern world. The intuitive and intellectual affinities between Stein and Wright are illuminated in several works of nonfiction. Stein's Paris France and Wright's Pagan Spain are meditations on expatriation and creativity. Their so-called homecoming narratives—Stein's Everybody's Autobiography and Wright's Black Power—examine concepts of racial and national identity in a post-modernist world. Respectively, in Lectures in America and White Man, Listen!, Stein and Wright outline the ways in which the poetics and politics of modernism are inextricably bound. At the close of the twentieth century, the meditations of Stein and Wright on the protean quality of individual identity and its artistic, social, and political expression explore the most prescient and pressing issues of our time and beyond.

Stein, Bishop, and Rich

Stein, Bishop, and Rich
Author: Margaret Dickie
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 252
Release: 1997
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780807846223

In an insightful and provocative juxtaposition, Margaret Dickie examines the poetry of three preeminent women writers_Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich_investigating the ways in which each attempts to forge a poetic voice capable of expr

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

Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of 'Genius'
Author: Barbara Will
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2000-05-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0748699341

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.

Women, America, and Movement

Women, America, and Movement
Author: Susan L. Roberson
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 1998
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780826211767

Since the colonial days, American women have traveled, migrated, and relocated, always faced with the challenge of reconstructing their homes for themselves and their families. Women, America, and Movement offers a journey through largely unexplored territory--the experiences of migrating American women. These narratives, both real and imagined, represent a range of personal and critical perspectives; some of the women describe their travels as expansive and freeing, while others relate the dreadful costs and sacrifices of relocating. Despite the range of essays featured in this study, the writings all coalesce around the issues of politics, poetry, and self- identity described by Adrienne Rich as the elements of the "politics of location," treated here as the politics of relocation. The narratives featured in this book explore the impact of race, class, and sexual economics on migratory women, their self-identity, and their roles in family and social life. These issues demonstrate that in addition to geographic place, ideology is itself a space to be traversed. By examining the writings of such women as Louise Erdrich, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gertrude Stein, the essayists included in this volume offer a variety of experiences. The book confronts such issues as racist politicking against Native Americans, African Americans, and Asian immigrants; sexist attitudes that limit women to the roles of wife, mother, and sexual object; and exploitation of migrants from Appalachia and of women newly arrived in America. These essays also delve into the writings themselves by looking at what happens to narrative structure as authors or their characters cross geographic boundaries. The reader sees how women writers negotiate relocation in their texts and how the written word becomes a place where one finds oneself.

The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913-1946

The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913-1946
Author: Gertrude Stein
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 920
Release: 2013
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0231063091

This monumental collection of correspondence between Gertrude Stein and critic, novelist, and photographer Carl Van Vechten provides crucial insight into Stein's life, art, and artistic milieu as well as Van Vechten's support of major cultural projects, such as the Harlem Renaissance. From their first meeting in 1913, Stein and Van Vechten formed a unique and powerful relationship, and Van Vechten worked vigorously to publish and promote Stein's work. Existing biographies of Stein--including her own autobiographical writings--omit a great deal about her experiences and thought. They lack the ordinary detail of what Stein called "daily everyday living" the immediate concerns, objects, people, and places that were the grist for her writing. These letters not only vividly represent those details but also showcase Stein and Van Vechten's private selves as writers. Edward Burns's extensive annotations include detailed cross-referencing of source materials.

Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric

Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric
Author: Sharon Kirsch
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2014-11-30
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0817318526

Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric posits that Stein was not only an influential literary modernist, but also one of the twentieth century's preeminent rhetoricians.

The Imaginary and Its Worlds

The Imaginary and Its Worlds
Author: Laura Bieger
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2013
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1611684072

Based on papers originally presented at a 2009 conference hosted at the John-F.-Kennedy-Institut of the Freie Univet'at Berlin.

The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder

The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder
Author: Gertrude Stein
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 492
Release: 1996-01-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780300067743

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