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gertrude stein's motives
So I promised a Gertrude Stein post to offset all the Tarantino material.
I just recently got done reading Tender Buttons, Stein's classic 1914 work. It's pretty wild stuff for any time, but especially for 1914. Part of the fun of reading this book has been trying to figure out what, exactly, the surrounding context for this intriguing piece of work might be. I know very little about Stein's biography, and this poem bears almost no resemblance to any other piece of pre-World War I poetry I've ever read. Critics often claim that Stein writes in a "Cubist" style-- whether Stein herself made this comparison I do not know --and with the Cubists emerging in France around 1907 this could be a potential lead, although I can't instinctively see the paralells between Cubism and the writing here.
Her project-- which seems to be largely centered around driving a wedge between language and content --would seem to place her within the tradition of the language poets, although she's about seventy years early to that party. I could also place her in the "prose poetry" tradition, but that really seems to take off around 1960 -- she'd be one of the first people to ever write such a thing (in English at least).
But this throws me right back into the question of context. What on earth could have been going on in her head to get her to just invent stuff like this out of whole cloth? Labels: book_commentary, poetry_commentary |
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
5:45 PM
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