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  • 14 Fiction:1900 to the 1930s
  • Donna M. Campbell

Scholarship on W. E. B. Du Bois and writers of the Harlem Renaissance, especially Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Fauset, continues to flourish this year, and a comparatively large number of articles on modernist and regionalist women writers such as Evelyn Scott and Ellen Glasgow appear in essay collections. Last year's centenary of the publication of Sister Carrie continues to yield articles on Dreiser, and a renewed interest in biography and autobiography characterizes work on several writers, including Gertrude Stein, Jack London, and Sherwood Anderson.

i Gertrude Stein

If Stein could not reinvent personal and political history, she could nevertheless reinvent the forms that shape these narratives, as several of this year's articles suggest. The most conventional of Stein's responses to history is her early essay, written while she was a Radclie student, entitled "The Modern Jew Who Has Given Up the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation" (PMLA 116: 416–28). As Amy Feinstein explains in her introduction to the piece, the essay is "one of the few known pieces in which Stein treats directly the question of Jewish identity"; its argument for the affirmative or isolationist position supports Feinstein's position that "Stein's essentialization of identity can be shown to be a constant presence throughout her oeuvre."

In his excellent interdisciplinary study Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science (Stanford) Stephen Meyer considers Stein's development as a writer within the context of the "literary (Laurence Sterne et al.), philosophical (Emerson, Whitehead), psychological (William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein), and neurophysiological (Lewellys Barker, Gerald Edelman, Francisco Varela)" investigations [End Page 305] into the nature of consciousness that inform her work. Meyer claims that Stein "reconfigured science as writing and performed scientific experiments in writing," so her "writing practice may thus be viewed as a form of laboratory science," a stance that explains her rejection of automatic writing and her insistence on the exact meanings of words. Thus to interpret the "dissociative writing" of Stein's middle period is to perform an act of "experimental reading" that recapitulates the writing process by forcing the reader to experience each word and letter individually, as Stein had recommended in the discussion of proofreading in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. In this manner, Stein sought to create what William James had called "knowledge of acquaintance" rather than what he described as "knowledge-about," fostering the reader's knowledge through the recapitulation of an experience rather than learning through simply reading a description of it. Dissenting from the "endless assertion of resistance or subversion that is attached to Stein's nonstandard language" in Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (Alabama), Juliana Spahr argues that her writings are not subversive but "connective," inviting readers to become authors themselves and promoting an egalitarian theory of reading. Spahr points out that Stein, the daughter of immigrants who spent some of her formative childhood years in Europe, was immersed in a polyglot existence that brought home to her the experience of reading as one who encounters a strange language. Stein's work thus seeks to recapitulate that experience and invent a new form of reading for her readers through features such as incomplete sentences, duplicate words, a restricted vocabulary, and word confusion. Everybody's Autobiography and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas thus constitute a means of explaining to readers that "her writing (her self) is not unreadable but rather hyper-readable."

Two pieces on Four Saints in Three Acts give equal time to Virgil Thomson's music and Stein's libretto. As Daniel Albright demonstrates in Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago, 2000), by the time of Four Saints in Three Acts Stein had moved toward a contemplation of "divinely arbitrary" numbers. Her view of counting as a uniquely human attribute informs the syntactically rather than harmonically dissonant music that Thomson composed for the work. Like Albright, who sees Four Saints in Three Acts as a piece wherein landscape is central but a void, Brad Bucknell also emphasizes Stein's concern with "the continuous present and landscape...

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