Gertrude Stein is a seminal figure in modern and postmodern literature, yet her work is not easily defined and has had both fierce supporters and equally fierce detractors. In a series of linked essays, How Reading Is Written considers a set of questions associated with reading Gertrude Stein today. In particular, how can we read a body of work that is largely resistant to conventional and interpretation-based models of literary criticism? The book is structurally and conceptually an index to Stein's poetics, and it considers Stein alongside other writers and thinkers, and across discourses of philosophy, science, queer theory, and literary criticism. Like Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael and Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, How Reading Is Written joins a tradition of books by poets about the writers who have intensely figured into their conception of poetry. Astrid Lorange recovers previously overlooked critical work on Stein and aims to construct a new intellectual episteme for Stein's work—one that connects with contemporary contexts as well as repositions Stein in her moment of transnational modernism.
Gertrude Stein is a seminal figure in modern and postmodern literature, yet her work is not easily defined and has had both fierce supporters and equally fierce detractors. In a series of linked essays, How Reading Is Written considers a set of questions associated with reading Gertrude Stein today. In particular, how can we read a body of work that is largely resistant to conventional and interpretation-based models of literary criticism? The book is structurally and conceptually an index to Stein's poetics, and it considers Stein alongside other writers and thinkers, and across discourses of philosophy, science, queer theory, and literary criticism. Like Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael and Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, How Reading Is Written joins a tradition of books by poets about the writers who have intensely figured into their conception of poetry. Astrid Lorange recovers previously overlooked critical work on Stein and aims to construct a new intellectual episteme for Stein's work—one that connects with contemporary contexts as well as repositions Stein in her moment of transnational modernism.
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Gertrude Stein is a seminal figure in modern and postmodern literature, yet her work is not easily defined and has had both fierce supporters and equally fierce detractors. In a series of linked essays, How Reading Is Written considers a set of questions associated with reading Gertrude Stein today. In particular, how can we read a body of work that is largely resistant to conventional and interpretation-based models of literary criticism? The book is structurally and conceptually an index to Stein's poetics, and it considers Stein alongside other writers and thinkers, and across discourses of philosophy, science, queer theory, and literary criticism. Like Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael and Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, How Reading Is Written joins a tradition of books by poets about the writers who have intensely figured into their conception of poetry. Astrid Lorange recovers previously overlooked critical work on Stein and aims to construct a new intellectual episteme for Stein's work—one that connects with contemporary contexts as well as repositions Stein in her moment of transnational modernism.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819575135 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2025 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 262 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
ASTRID LORANGE is a poet and an associate lecturer at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales.
Astrid Lorange is a poet and an associate lecturer at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Bodies
Whatever can be said about the complexity and ambiguity of the status of the "body" in various and often at-odds discourses, the fact remains that the body of Gertrude Stein was and is explicitly interpellated by readers in a number of ways. Hers was the body of a queer Jewish woman, its fatness often read as evidence of the overlay of otherness. The gendered, sexualized, and racialized readings of Stein's body correspond to a litany of paratextual overdeterminations, prejudices, and projections regarding her work and its perceived meanings.
In Gertrude Stein Remembered (ed. Simon), a collection of accounts by people who knew her, Stein's body is the ubiquitous preoccupation. Arthur Lachman writes that Stein was a "heavy-set, ungainly young woman, very mannish in her appearance" and "awkward with her hands" (4). Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler commends her "fine Roman head" (19), Sherwood Anderson admires her "red cheeks and sturdy legs" (62), and Samuel Barlow recalls her "massive figure" clothed in monkish robes (67). Carl Van Vechten goes into great detail: "She is massive in physique, a Rabelaisian woman with a splendid thoughtful face; mind dominating her matter. Her velvet robes, mostly brown, and her carpet slippers associate themselves with her indoor appearance. To go out she belts herself, adds a walking staff, and a trim unmodish turban" (42–43). Harold Acton, comparing Stein and Picasso, cites their similarities: "Both were rugged and squarely built; both had short hair and might have been taken for Aztec Mexicans"; then notes a (markedly gendered) distinction: "Whereas Picasso was muscularly mobile Gertrude was dumpilystatic" (113). Stein's bigness is the constant theme: Cecil Beaton remembers her "monumental" body (139), and Mabel Dodge famously celebrated the "pounds and pounds and pounds piled on her skeleton — not the billowing kind, but massive, heavy fat" (25).
Stein's fatness is often read as evidence of her appetite, which is also mentioned variously. Sherwood Anderson recalls Stein's perennial desire for and appreciation of "handmade goodies" (61) and names Stein "the woman in the great kitchen of words" (62) who represents "something sweet and healthy in our American life" (63). For Lachman, Stein's appetite for treats signified her appetite for fame and success; indeed, the two appetites share the same set of references. Lachman quotes Leo Stein, whose criticisms of his sister included the accusation that she was passionately vain (she "hungers and thirsts for gloire" [8]), and to which Lachman adds his own assessment: Stein demonstrates an "almost morbid craving for recognition" (8). [See also Food (pp. 81–82)]
In "The Somagrams of Gertrude Stein," Catharine Stimpson reads this emphasis on Stein's body (both in place of and defining her writing) as symptomatic of broader anxieties about the female body: she argues that the female body is figured as a kind of "monstrosity" by patriarchal designation, something to be both managed and pathologized (67). Stein's body, she continues, "presents an alarming, but irresistible, opportunity" for scrutiny, because "the size of it, the eyes, nose, sweat, hair, laugh, cheekbones" were all and at once "strange," "unusual," "special," and "invigorating" (67). Further, she argues, Stein's fatness functions as a signifier "capacious enough to absorb contradictory attitudes towards the female body" (67). On the one hand, according to Stimpson, Stein's admirers read her fatness as the physical analogue of her intellectual largeness, vitality, and achievement (67). On the other hand, Stein's detractors read her fatness as exactly the opposite: proof of a "hideous cultural and psychological overrun" (68). For Carl Van Vechten, cited above, Stein achieves a victory of "mind over ... matter," with her quick wit and mental acuity able to harness the greatness of her body; and for less sympathetic critics such as Lachman, who later in his recollection appeals to a speculative hypothesis by psychologist B. F. Skinner that Stein cultivated and was ultimately betrayed by a second "personality" that practiced automatic writing, Stein suffers the opposite fate: her mind is weak, suggestible, and inevitably dominated by her unthinking body. In both cases, a mind/body split is taken as a natural fact, and in both cases, the gendered implications are clear: a woman must manage her body in order to be intellectually impressive. [See also Grammar (pp. 99–100)]
In Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Elizabeth Grosz identifies a foundational "somaphobia" that underscores Western philosophical thought. For Plato, she writes, "it was evident that reason should rule over the body and over the irrational or appetitive functions of the soul." Here the body is a kind of "prison," which "interfere[s] in," is a "danger to," and "betrays" the mind. Its usefulness, she continues in her gloss, is in its delineation of a "natural hierarchy, a self-evident ruler-ruled relation" which "alone makes possible a harmony with the state, the family, and the individual." This, she concludes, is "one of the earliest representations of the body politic" (5). The designation of the body as a constraint — that which restricts and regulates by limiting and delimiting the individual — has persisted variously throughout Western thought. As a result, the relationship between a subject's body and the rights afforded or denied it, on the basis of biological, medical, legal, social, and cultural institutions (institutions whose meanings are determined in part by designations of gender, race, class, sexuality, and age), have also varied significantly over time, yet in any given instance they have been taken as legislative in the determination of relative autonomy. In the twentieth century, different attempts were made to challenge philosophical somaphobia and the regulation of bodies according to essentialist determination. From a feminist perspective, these attempts can broadly be organized into the following categories: poststructuralism, corporealism, intersectionalism, and new materialism (here I am following, loosely, Jasbir Puar's breakdown in her essay "'I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess': Intersectionality, Assemblage, and Affective Politics"; these categories are of course not mutually exclusive).
Judith Butler's Gender Trouble is perhaps the signal text for the first category. Here Butler argues that gender does not correspond to (what is taken to be intractably) biological sex but is constructed via repeated, performative gestures that adhere to, or can subvert, heteronormative expectations and naturalized assumptions about identity. A corporeal account, such as that from Grosz, argues for a critical theorization of sexual difference. Following on from Luce Irigaray, Grosz gives an account of the body as constitutive of, and engaged with, manifold differences — differences that are systematically effaced in order to reinstate the singular subject of patriarchy and to deny the autonomy of otherness. Intersectionalism (following the foundational work of Kimberlé Crenshaw) argues that the body constitutes complex and dynamic interrelationships between gender, sexuality, race, class, age, and other markers of identification that are legislated, designated, and denied by hegemonic order and colonial/capitalist economies of power. For the new materialist and science studies feminists (such as Donna Haraway and Karen Barad), the body is not a definite or singular unity but, rather, constitutive of diverse phenomena. Both Haraway and Barad give a posthumanist account of the body: for Haraway, the techno-historical context of the era of the cyborg challenges the binaries of nature/culture, mind/body, and male/female by troubling the distinction between human and nonhuman agency and corporeality; for Barad (as discussed in greater detail below), quantum physics presents a phenomenal ontology that does not assert a gap between the world and its representation. At the heart of this complex of feminist critiques and counter-critiques are genuinely difficult questions to do with what constitutes the body. Thinking-the-body requires a simultaneous attention to the philosophical and political claims of bodily life — engaging both the body as complex and the body as subject not as though the claims were either oppositional or identical, but differentiated sites of intense speculation and activity.
Barad began her academic career as a particle physicist in quantum field theory. She is now a scholar of feminist theory and philosophy, and her research considers the material consequences of quantum physics alongside contemporary feminist and queer inquiry. In the essay "Posthuman Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter," Barad outlines her theory of "agential realism," a philosophy that posits "phenomena" as the constitutive unit of the world. Everything in the world, including but by no means only human bodies, emerges via the complex "intra-action" of phenomena. Intra-action is to be understood "in contrast to the usual 'interaction,' which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relata" (818). Matter materializes through the intra-actions of phenomena: [See also Objects (pp. 145–146)]
The world is a dynamic process of intra-activity in the ongoing re-configuring of locally determinate causal structures with determinate boundaries, properties, meanings, and patterns of marks on bodies. This ongoing flow of agency through which "part" of the world makes itself differentially intelligible to another "part" of the world and through which local causal structures, boundaries, and properties are stabilized and destabilized does not take place in space and time but in the making of spacetime itself. The world is an ongoing open process of mattering through which "mattering" itself acquires meaning and form in the realization of different agential possibilities. (817)
In this complex ontology, there are a number of key tropes. Performativity refers to the processes through which matter materializes and acquires meaning — in contrast to representation, through which meaning is applied to matter independent of its material becoming. Performativity is necessarily posthuman because it does not privilege the human subject and does not argue for any essential difference between human and nonhuman bodies. And agency is not aligned with human intentionality or human subjectivity, nor is it an attribute; it is a "doing" or "being" and refers to the enactments of "iterative changes to particular practices through the dynamics of intra-activity" (827). Barad is careful to point out that since discursive practices are often confused with or taken as meaning linguistic expression, discourse is imagined as being specific to human experience. But, she continues, the agential realist position opposes any such conflation of discursivity and humanness. "If," she writes, "'humans' refers to phenomena, not independent entities with inherent properties but rather beings in their differential becoming, particular material (re)configurings of the world with shifting boundaries and properties that stabilise and destabilise along with specific material changes in what it means to be human, then the notion of discursivity cannot be founded on an inherent distinction between humans and nonhumans" (818).
Posthumanist performativity is a mode of engagement that is, first, not confined to human praxis, and, second, concerned with the coming-to-be, that is, the performative aspect of, intra-actions and processes of meaning making. Barad concludes her multiple definitions with a thesis statement of sorts: "discursive practices are specific material (re)configurings of the world through which local determinations of boundaries, properties, and meaning are differentially enacted. That is, discursive practices are ongoing agential intra-actions of the world through which local determinacy is enacted within the phenomena produced" (820–821, emphasis in original). In rethinking materiality as discursive practice, Barad is talking, in part, about both language and the body. Language is one kind of discursive practice; so too is the process through which one thinks and talks about/through/from/of the body. Further, the body, as phenomena (the plural here is intended), is neither a discrete entity nor a definite object. What counts as the body, and what accounts for the body in its specific, local determinations of "boundaries, properties, and meaning," will be necessarily "differentially enacted" (821). "All bodies," writes Barad, "come to matter through the world's iterative intra-activity — its performativity. ... Bodies are not objects with inherent boundaries and properties; they are material-discursive phenomena" (823). Performativity offers an alternative to representationalism, shifting the focus, in Barad's words, from "questions of correspondences between descriptions and reality ... to matters of practices/doings/actions" (802).
Sara Ahmed has carefully critiqued Barad for her tendency to overstate the perceived power of language (and therefore representationalism) in contemporary theory. Barad opens her essay by claiming: "Language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every 'thing'— even materiality — is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation" (801). Ahmed argues that to posit language as more trusted than matter only serves to reinforce the notion that the two are somehow opposed — and that one or the other can be an "'it' that we can be for or against" (35). What is needed is an account of language and matter and their relation: words and things coexist in a world that exceeds/encompasses both; further, language is a kind of matter. To be sure, such a project seems at the heart of both Barad's thesis and Ahmed's critique — they are each invested in a feminist politics that accounts for the "material-semiotic" (to use Haraway's term, which Barad and Ahmed both cite) realities of contemporary experience. With the cautious amendments of Ahmed in mind, I read Barad as attempting a kind of alternative paradigm for reading the relation between language and matter — something that, as far as this present study is concerned, provides generous ground for thinking.
Recently, Michael Halewood has engaged with Barad alongside Whitehead's notion of symbolism in order to rethink the relation of language and the body in contemporary critical and sociological theory. By Halewood's account, Whiteheadian symbolism provides an alternative to theories of representationalism for which signification is the central mode of meaning making and through which the body is divided. According to Halewood (and here he is aligned with Barad), the body, despite its prevalence as an object of study in cultural and social theory, has nevertheless remained tethered to the long-held assumption that we live in a bifurcated world in which nature and culture are divided realms with discrete realities. This assumption figures the biological body as belonging to the "hard" sciences, and the social/cultural body as belonging to "soft" sciences of the humanities. "The further that social research uncovers and describes the very sociality of the body," writes Halewood, "the further such analyses both empirically and conceptually distance themselves from the 'biological' body." Therefore, he continues, "the 'natural' body is viewed more and more rigidly as either some kind of a fiction ... or as an irrelevance to the varied levels of social and cultural meanings which are somehow attached or written upon the body" (105).
As Halewood notes, there have been significant attempts to write against this bifurcated model and to theorize the body as both a material and a social entity: in other words, to theorize the body as phenomena. Halewood names Barad as someone who has made such an attempt, and while he acknowledges Butler's significant contributions to such theory, especially in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, he also identifies what he believes to be a key problem in her formulation — namely, that she conceives language and the body as being cleaved by a gap that might only ever be bridged via signification (106). In Bodies That Matter, Butler posits a split between the external and historical processes that produce and enforce gendered subject positions, and the internal, actual, and individual experiences of these subject positions. The materiality of the body is recognized as the interface between these historical, normalizing processes and individuating, experiencing subjectivity. This then posits the material body as the end result of these interfacing processes; that is, a surface on which such processes are registered and made legible. While Barad also acknowledges the importance of Butler's emphasis on the historicity of matter, she argues that Butler's matter remains the passive outcome of discursive practice; furthermore, Butler's bodies are invariably human. What is needed, according to Barad, is for the notion of matter to be further reworked, such that it "acknowledges the existence of important linkages between discursive practices and material phenomena without ... anthropocentric limitations" (882 n. 26). Similarly, Halewood calls for "a theoretical account of the complex status of the body within existence, an account which is able to describe both the materiality of the body and its sociality" (106).
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "How Reading Is Written"
by .
Copyright © 2014 ASTRID LORANGE.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Bodies
Contemporaneity
Food
Grammar
Identity
Objects
Play
Queering
Repetition
United States of America
Coda
Bibliography
What People are Saying About This
“How Reading is Written is not about any old Stein. It is about Stein the linguistic innovator, the potential creator of the avant-garde tradition that so defines the last half of the twentieth century. So while this is a single author study, it is no old-fashioned single author study. It is, in short, a good read, a scholarship of homage and complication.”
“How Reading Is Written is a vastly generative text, in its methodology as in its insights. Lorange situates the multiple creative concepts of Stein’s writings in networks of vivacious comprehending. Rich in its perspectives, this book is essential for contemporary engagements with Gertrude Stein.”
“Lorange’s study of Gertrude Stein brings a strongly contemporary sense of theoretical possibilities and a thoroughly plausible conviction that Stein’s work is of enduring importance, both as technical innovation and as a very particularized but persuasive performance of thought. Stein is seen here as ‘a writer who makes things happen’ for the reader, and as a critic Lorange does that too—she is adept at getting her audience fully engaged.”