Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity

Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity
Author: Karen Leick
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2013-05-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1136603468

This book is a cultural history of Stein’s rise to fame and the function of literary celebrity in America from 1910 to 1935. By examining not the ways that Stein portrayed the popular in her work, but the ways the popular portrayed her, this study shows that there was an intimate relationship between literary modernism and mainstream culture and that modernist writers and texts were much more well-known than has been previously acknowledged. Specifically, Leick reveals through the case study of Stein that the relationship between mass culture and modernism in America was less antagonistic, more productive and integrated than previous studies have suggested.

Gertrude Stein and the Making of Jewish Modernism

Gertrude Stein and the Making of Jewish Modernism
Author: Amy Feinstein
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2022-06-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813072395

Challenging the assumption that modernist writer Gertrude Stein seldom integrated her Jewish identity and heritage into her work, this book uncovers Stein’s constant and varied writing about Jewish topics throughout her career. Amy Feinstein argues that Judaism was central to Stein’s ideas about modernity, showing how Stein connects the modernist era to the Jewish experience.  Combing through Stein’s scholastic writings, drafting notebooks, and literary works, Feinstein analyzes references to Judaism that have puzzled scholars. She reveals the never-before-discussed influence of Matthew Arnold as well as a hidden Jewish framework in Stein’s epic novel The Making of Americans. In Stein’s experimental “voices” poems, Feinstein identifies an explicitly Jewish vocabulary that expresses themes of marriage, nationalism, and Zionism. She also shows how Wars I Have Seen, written in Vichy France during World War II, compares the experience of wartime occupation with the historic persecution of Jews.  Affirming the importance of Jewish identity and modernist style to Gertrude Stein’s legacy as a writer, this book radically changes the way we read and appreciate Stein’s work.

Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity

Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity
Author: Karen Leick
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2013-05-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 113660345X

This book is a cultural history of Stein’s rise to fame and the function of literary celebrity in America from 1910 to 1935. By examining not the ways that Stein portrayed the popular in her work, but the ways the popular portrayed her, this study shows that there was an intimate relationship between literary modernism and mainstream culture and that modernist writers and texts were much more well-known than has been previously acknowledged. Specifically, Leick reveals through the case study of Stein that the relationship between mass culture and modernism in America was less antagonistic, more productive and integrated than previous studies have suggested.

Wars I Have Seen

Wars I Have Seen
Author: Gertrude Stein
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2013-03-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307830195

A memoir of the Nazi occupation—and the Allied liberation—of France, from the iconic author of Tender Buttons and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Intimate friends of Gertrude Stein, aware of her indomitable courage and resourcefulness, were not at all surprised when she emerged unscathed from the Nazi occupation of France, her Picasso collection intact and her poodle, Basket, wagging his tail contentedly at her heels. But Stein had her full share of troubles and excitement in those four years, and it is this unbelievable period that she documents in full in this most graphic and revealing of all her books. Written in longhand under the very noses of the Nazis, Wars I Have Seen is the on-the-spot story of what the people of France endured. From the early days, in which Stein was more concerned with foraging food for her dogs than with the fate of democracy, to the coming of the Americans, which gave her the thrill of a lifetime, Stein depicts the heroic exploits of the French Resistance fighters and the excitement of the battle for liberation with all of her signature literary panache.

Gertrude Stein Has Arrived

Gertrude Stein Has Arrived
Author: Roy Morris Jr.
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2019-09-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 142143153X

Toklas—the true power behind the throne.

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 Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Author: Gertrude Stein
Publisher: Blurb
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2018-07-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781388227289

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was written in 1933 by Gertrude Stein in the guise of an autobiography authored by Alice B. Toklas, who was her lover. It is a fascinating insight into the art scene in Paris as the couple were friends with Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. They begin the war years in England but return to France, volunteering for the American Fund for the French Wounded, driving around France, helping the wounded and homeless. After the war Gertrude has an argument with T. S. Eliot after he finds one of her writings inappropriate. They become friends with Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. It was written to make money and was indeed a commercial success. However, it attracted criticism, especially from those who appeared in the book and didn't like the way they were depicted.

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.

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Gertrude Stein

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Gertrude Stein
Author: Logan Esdale
Publisher: Modern Language Association
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2018-08-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1603293450

A trailblazing modernist, Gertrude Stein studied psychology at Radcliffe with William James and went on to train as a medical doctor before coming out as a lesbian and moving to Paris, where she collected contemporary art and wrote poetry, novels, and libretti. Known as a writer's writer, she has influenced every generation of American writers since her death in 1946 and remains avant-garde. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," provides information and resources that will help teachers and students begin and pursue their study of Stein. The essays of part 2, "Approaches," introduce major topics to be covered in the classroom--race, gender, feminism, sexuality, narrative form, identity, and Stein's experimentation with genre--in a wide range of contexts, including literary analysis, art history, first-year composition, and cultural studies.

Virtual Modernism

Virtual Modernism
Author: Katherine Biers
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2013-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0816687609

In Virtual Modernism, Katherine Biers offers a fresh view of the emergence of American literary modernism from the eruption of popular culture in the early twentieth century. Employing dynamic readings of the works of Stephen Crane, Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein, she argues that American modernist writers developed a “poetics of the virtual” in response to the rise of mass communications technologies before World War I. These authors’ modernist formal experimentation was provoked by the immediate, individualistic pleasures and thrills of mass culture. But they also retained a faith in the representational power of language—and the worth of common experience—more characteristic of realism and naturalism. In competition with new media experiences such as movies and recorded music, they simultaneously rejected and embraced modernity. Biers establishes the virtual poetics of these five writers as part of a larger “virtual turn” in the United States, when a fascination with the writings of Henri Bergson, William James, and vitalist philosophy—and the idea of virtual experience—swept the nation. Virtual Modernism contends that a turn to the virtual experience of language was a way for each of these authors to carve out a value for the literary, both with and against the growth of mass entertainments. This technologically inspired reengagement with experience was formative for American modernism. Situated at the crossing points of literary criticism, philosophy, media studies, and history, Virtual Modernism provides an examination of Progressive Era preoccupations with the cognitive and corporeal effects of new media technologies that traces an important genealogy of present-day concerns with virtuality.