Abstract

This essay asserts that American radio acted as a powerful formal influence on Gertrude Stein's late writing. The radio provides a suggestive new means of connecting Stein's early aural experimentalism with her later, more popular, idiom. Through the 1930s and 1940s Stein wrestles with the idea of radio as a kind of public sphere--a forum in which self, other, and community can be constituted through talk and listening. Hearing the radio in Stein's late work is an important step toward recognizing the radio's distinct thematic and stylistic contributions to mid-century modernism.

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