Desperate Seriousness and Avant-Garde (Mis) Recognition in Some of Stein's Sentences

Abstract

Even a cursory glance at John Ashbery's Tennis Court Oath (1962), Lynn Hejinian's My Life (1987), Charles Bernstein's A Poetics (1992), or any of the works of Leslie Scalapino shows just how wide and how liberating the influence of Gertrude Stein has been on postmodern poets. Has Stein had (or can she have) a similar effect on lay readers? Recent feminist recuperations of Stein indicate that she does and can have such an impact. Following Catherine Stimpson and Marianne DeKoven, critics such as Lisa Ruddick and Elizabeth Fifer cast Stein's difficult texts as forays into pre-Oedipal, presymbolic language-as a writing of jouissance or feminist gnosis.2 Of all the emancipatory feminist approaches to Stein, Harriet Chessman's stress on her intimate, anti-authoritarian dialogism is perhaps the most compelling.3 Chessman makes the convincing point that in a confrontation with Stein's works, reading becomes understood as a lively participation that does not always or exclusively rely on referential language to encompass a response.4 The lack of referentiality thus leads the reader to a dialogue with a text whose meanings are open and playfully presented. I take