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Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: “Announce what you see” 1 1 Talking and Listening in Stein’s Early Life and Works 15 “Interested in the mere workings of the machinery” 15 The Potential Remaking of Americans, or Revising America 18 Sound Writing 30 A Sensible Education 33 2 Modifying the Mind: William James and Tender Buttons 36 Tender Buttons Disturb a Center: Questioning Our Rhetorical Religion 44 3 Conversational Relations in Geography and Plays 57 Recognizing the Real in a Collage of Words and Phrases 57 Food and Talk 62 The Motivations behind What Happened 65 What Can Happen When People Talk and Read 68 Conversation Patterning as the Essence of What Happens 75 Some Discoveries: Subtle Antagonism, or Free Play in Language 79 Repairing Friendship in “Susie Asado” 83 One-sided Conversations with Shakespeare, or Tricked by Talk 86 4 Talk in the Thirties: In the Present, with the Past 89 Starting Conversations in America 90 What They Might Have Talked About 96 Stein and Einstein 98 The Closed American Mind 101 Writing and Speaking in Stein’s Quirky Defining 103 Learning about Listening through Reading Borrow and Smollett 110 Stein’s Reading and Writing of “Rights” and “Rites” 113 viii Contents 5 Talking Boundaries into Thresholds in Ida 119 “Who is any one said the wife to the husband” 124 Fame and the Public: Alienation from the Self 127 The Self and Its Trappings 131 Stein at Night Means Delight 133 Standing in the Window 138 Also Known As, or The Metaphor of Sight 141 The Death of Conversation, or The Monologue of Death 144 Human Intertextuality 147 6 Expressing a State of Mind: Conversation, Politics, and Individuality in Mrs. Reynolds and Brewsie and Willie 149 Talking under an Angel Harper Cloud 153 “A queer state of living,” or Resistance through Reticulation and Local Area Networks 162 Getting Together and Thinking in Brewsie and Willie 170 Yes-and-No “Job-men” 177 Stein “ain’t so phony as she sounds” 185 Real Ideas 191 Conclusions: Feminine Endings 193 “The Woman Who Changed the Mind of a Nation” 193 Sublime Amalgamations 199 Notes 205 Bibliography 235 News Articles Relevant to Stein’s 1934–1935 Lecture Tour 247 Index 251 ...

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