Research Catalog

Rescued readings : a reconstruction of Gertrude Stein's difficult texts

Title

Rescued readings : a reconstruction of Gertrude Stein's difficult texts / Elizabeth Fifer.

Author

Fifer, Elizabeth

Publication

Detroit : Wayne State University Press, [1992]
©1992

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Use in library	PS3537.T323 Z589 1992	Off-site

Details

Description

146 pages; 24 cm

Summary

Gertrude Stein's texts provoke readers. Rescued Readings, concentrating on the interaction of Stein's lesbianism and her art, emphasizes the dynamics of this provocation. The relationship between sexuality and textuality deserves attention, not least because Stein's use of her homosexuality as a subject for her work has too long isolated her, making her texts "unreadable." Fifer argues that Stein's equivocal attitude toward her homosexuality, repeatedly discussed in many of the works she chose not to publish during her lifetime, is the basis of her experimental style. Regardless of the particularities of the time or place of their production, Stein's erotic subjects produce similar patterns of complex language and experimental narrative strategies. Fifer examines how we can learn to "read" these patterns and strategies, just as we can "decode" Stein's conscious manipulation of an oblique vocabulary of lesbian eroticism, in order to deepen our appreciation of Stein's art. The particular literary works under discussion include parts of the Yale Edition of The Unpublished Writings; three volumes of her plays, Geography and Plays, Operas and Plays, Last Operas and Plays; and one prose work, Useful Knowledge. Fifer presents an introduction to Stein's manifest and hidden texts, and provides an overview of intention and technique, exploring the defensive mechanisms of key texts from different points in Stein's career. Rescued Readings also explores the revealing and concealing modes of Stein's erotic language, her "conversations" with readers and others, and the effect of her choosing the homosexual alliance as her specific paradigm for the relationship between reader and writer.

Subject

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. 137-139) and index.

Contents

1. Father, brother, lover, other: Gertrude Stein and the search for identity -- 2. "Is flesh advisable?": the interior theater of Gertrude Stein -- 3. Characteristic deformations in the language of the plays -- 4. "Guardians and witnesses": narrative technique in "Useful knowledge" -- 5. "An autobiography in two instances": imagining the reader, early and late -- 6. "In conversation": speaker, message, and receiver.

ISBN

0814323405
9780814323403

LCCN

92007291

OCLC

ocm25410997
25410997
SCSB-9426302

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library