Abstract
This chapter focuses on Stein’s early texts, both the collection Three Livesand the family history The Making of Americans. It argues that those texts are hermeneutical projects, centred on grasping the process of understanding self and others. In the story “Melanctha,” the chapter argues, Stein complicates the processes of psychological and grammatical understanding that constitute the hermeneutical act by infusing her writing with the rhythms of life-in-the-making. In The Making of Americansshe takes her experiment even further and by and large lets go of narrative convention. Via Josiah Royce and Otto Weininger, with whose work Stein was familiar, the chapter reconfigures our understanding of The Making of Americansand shows it to be not only a Jamesian exercise in descriptive psychology but also a hermeneutical experiment, in which thinking, interpreting and writing constitute vitalist acts.
Published Version
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