Overview
- Launches a new approach for understanding Stein’s experimental writing
- Interprets vital texts in Stein’s work including poetry, plays, portraiture, and anti-narratives
- Practices Stein’s radical epistemology as a method of reading in place of conventional rationalism
Part of the book series: American Literature Readings in the 21st Century (ALTC)
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About this book
This book offers a bold critical method for reading Gertrude Stein’s work on its own terms by forgoing conventional explanation and adopting Stein’s radical approach to meaning and knowledge. Inspired by the immanence of landscape, both of Provence where she travelled in the 1920s and the spatial relations of landscape painting, Stein presents a new model of meaning whereby making sense is an activity distributed in a text and across successive texts. From love poetry, to plays and portraiture, Linda Voris offers close readings of Stein’s most anthologized and less known writing in a case study of a new method of interpretation. By practicing Stein’s innovative means of making sense, Voris reveals the excitement of her discoveries and the startling implications for knowledge, identity, and intimacy.
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Keywords
Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“Linda Voris’s The Composition of Sense in Gertrude Stein’s Landscape Writing is, quite simply, a game-changer for Stein scholarship. This important monograph proposes a radical new critical approach to Stein’s work … .” (Georgina Nugent-Folan, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Vol. 37 (2), 2018)
“A stunningly concrete, lucid, and rich account of how Stein’s radical empiricism becomes an imaginative method for establishing for writing the possibilities of a continuous present and infinitely mobile spatial relations. Voris is a supple reader of Modernist painting—so the variety and intricacy of her accounts of Stein's writing is simply riveting.” (Charles Altieri, Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley, USA)
“Voris brilliantly shows that key Stein plays and portraits. . . make perfect compositional sense. This is one of the very best studies of Gertrude Stein to date: it makes the reader SEE how Stein’s difficult but endlessly fascinating ’radical empiricism’ really works.” (Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emerita of English, Stanford University, and Professor Emerita, University of Southern California, USA)
“Voris convincingly shows that Stein’s view of knowledge as a composed space requires from us an epistemological shift. If wecan manage it, as Stein did, the outcome is liberation from reason’s linearity. This magnificent book is exhilarating on multiple fronts, and it is not only Stein scholars who should avidly read it.” (Lyn Hejinian, poet, essayist and Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley, USA)
“This book is a true elucidation (in Gertrude Stein’s sense of the word). This is the most nuanced, attentive, and patient reading of Stein since Ulla Dydo set the bar for Voris to surpass. It will radically alter the landscape, as it were, of modernist criticism.” (Craig Dworkin, poet and Professor of English, University of Utah, USA)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Linda Voris is Associate Professor of Literature at American University, Washington, D.C., USA. Her publications have appeared in Modernism/modernity, Studies in American Fiction, and American Women Poets in the 21st-Century.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Composition of Sense in Gertrude Stein's Landscape Writing
Authors: Linda Voris
Series Title: American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32064-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-32063-2Published: 21 October 2016
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-81186-4Published: 16 June 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-32064-9Published: 12 October 2016
Series ISSN: 2634-579X
Series E-ISSN: 2634-5803
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 264
Topics: Twentieth-Century Literature, Poetry and Poetics, North American Literature