Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

Scholarship on fiction for this period holds a few surprises, such as a flurry of interest in John P. Marquand after years of critical silence. The trend toward a more varied and interdisciplinary focus, especially that based in science and technology as applied to issues of race and evolution, continues. Essays on Gertrude Stein and science, Jack London and empire, and W. E. B. Du Bois and visual culture take studies of these authors in new and promising directions. Issues of authenticity and cultural appropriation are also a theme, with essays examining Ellen Glasgow's construction of the past, Mary Austin's use of native culture, John Dos Passos's and Mary Borden's writings on war, and the use of autobiography and memoir by a number of writers. More work on women writers such as Rachel Grimké appears this year, and there is more serious attention to work in genres such as adventure fiction and children's literature. Increasingly, too, essays address the connections between print and other media.

i Gertrude Stein

The effects of Stein's scientific and philosophical training are the focus of several interesting essays on Stein. Maria Farland's "Gertrude Stein's Brain Work" (AL 76: 117–48) reads The Making of Americans through the nuances of the author's medical training at Johns Hopkins. Farland points out that although Stein's training included the preparation and description of brain specimens, which gave her practical knowledge of brain physiology, such work was devalued as labor for women and lesser minds; moreover, the era's belief in the variability hypothesis, which posited both emotional conservatism and a lack of abstract thinking in women's brains, worked against the integration of women into the sciences. Stein's modernist practice in The Making of Americans responds by insisting on abstract thought, precise description, and an experimental approach to authorship based in scientific method—all techniques marshaled both to mimic and to refute the scientific standards of the day. In "The Science of Superstition: Gertrude Stein, William James, and the Formation of Belief" (MFS 51: 60–87) Stephanie L. Hawkins links Stein's rejection of 19th-century faith in scientific positivism to that of William James, though Stein went beyond James in her belief that "belief itself is a product of vision." Stein's use of the pseudoscience of palmistry in "The Universe or Hand-Reading" reveals palmistry as a platitudinous surface masking the complexity of competing desires revealed elsewhere in the poem, just as her use of superstition more generally signifies falsely reassuring paradigms of interpretation and belief. Stein's use of superstition thus self-reflexively calls attention to the false premises of realist representation. James's work, this time on habit, also provides the basis for Lisi Schoenbach's claim that Stein's modernism owes more to pragmatism than surrealism in "'Peaceful and Exciting': Habit, Shock, and Gertrude Stein's Pragmatic Modernism" (MoMo 11: 239–59). Discussing Stein's repetitive forms, Schoenbach grounds Stein's practice in James's and John Dewey's ideas of habit as well as in Walter Benjamin's concept of "habituated unconsciousness"; constitutive of national as well as individual identity, habit mitigates the shock of the new especially as embodied in discourses of publicity and civilization. Considering Stein's narrative repetitions in Three Lives, Jennifer Fleissner in Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (Chicago) uses Freud's theories of the interconnections of the pleasure principle and death drive to analyze Stein's willed narrative repetitions as "rhythms" that work "to constitute radically individual feminine selfhood."

In analyzing Stein's approach to celebrity and autobiography, Jessica G. Rabin's Surviving the Crossing discusses Stein's use of transitional figures—"the mixed-race individual, the cosmopolitan, and the Wandering Jew"—to represent both fluidity in identity and the problem of internal and external perspectives; according to Rabin, her work thus also enables fluid boundaries of categories such as "novel" and "autobiography." Loren Glass's Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 (NYU) likewise addresses Stein's use of autobiography, this time Everybody's...