Primary Stein: Returning to the Writing of Gertrude Stein ed. by Janet Boyd and Sharon J. Kirsch, Gertrude Stein in Europe: Reconfigurations across Media, Disciplines, and Traditions ed. by Sarah Posman and Laura Luise Schultz

Abstract

Primary Stein: Returning to the Writing of Gertrude Stein, edited by Janet Boyd and Sharon J. Kirsch. Lexington, 2014. 310 pages. Gertrude Stein in Europe: Reconfigurations across Media, Disciplines, and Traditions, edited by Sarah Posman and Laura Luise Schultz. Bloomsbury, 2015. 294 pages. Happily and in a timely way, Janet Boyd and Sharon J. Kirsch's edited collection Primary Stein: Returning to the Writing of Gertrude Stein accomplishes just what it sets out to do, which is to shift attention away from Stein's life and the spurious allegations surrounding it and back to her writing as work that can be, and demands to be, read for its literary, historical, and linguistic value. A much-needed antidote to a very tired debate surrounding Stein's politics and position in history, Primary Stein assembles critical essays by leading and up-and-coming scholars in Stein studies and modernism that, in the main, locus on individual works in a variety of critical and historical contexts. Arranged such that they trace the arc of Stein's career, the essays address Stein's and Toklas's early publishing efforts (Gabrielle Dean); the influence of Stein's experimental writing upon that of Virginia Woolf (Rachel Blau DuPlessis); the sociosexual context for Patriarchal Poetry (Jody Cardinal); the intersections between Stein's work and Romanticism (Rebecca Ariel Porte and, separately, Sarah Posman); alternative lenses for reading--and teaching--Stein's rhetoric and drama (Kirsch and Linda Voris, respectively); and the relationship of American geography to Stein's prose (Janet Boyd). Included also is a playful new close reading of the often studied Tender Buttons (Neil Schmitz), Adam Frank's introduction of readers to Radio Free Stein, and Steven Gould Axelrod's incisive analysis of Mrs. Reynolds as an anti-Hitler novel. Axelrod's essay is particularly noteworthy in that it reads Stein's wartime politics through one of her works, in a refreshing departure from the widespread allegations about her loyalties that are based on willful elisions of her writing. Taken in aggregate, these essays open new critical avenues for further investigation at the same time that they suggest new ways for teaching Stein's writing in the classroom, a point underscored in the polyvalent meaning of the book's title. Scholarship on Gertrude Stein's work has long been a fraught endeavor, marked by the notion that one must retrace the history of Gertrude Stein as a personage in order to discuss the work in a way that is not naively unaware of her lived history. It is hard to come up with any other major American writer who needs such constant reintroduction or, rather, permission to exist; and this precarity of position has meant that there have been many interruptions in discussions of the work itself. In the wake of two excellent biographies, James R. Mellow's Charmed Circle (1974) and Linda Wagner-Martin's Favored Strangers (1995), attention to Stein frequently has entailed a far greater emphasis on her life story and the famous company she kept at 27 rue de Fleurus. Often when the critical conversation has turned to Stein's writing, it has been freighted with assumptions surrounding her status as a woman--and therefore presumably feminist--artist, or else loaded with judgment of Stem's relationship to her Jewish identity. Part of what might be termed Stein's identity problem is due to the historically male-gendered category of modernist writer, a being traditionally exemplified in the form of James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Ernest Hemingway (on whose style Stein clearly had an influence). Part of Stein's identity problem is also due to scholars' suspicions surrounding her relationship to the Vichy regime during World War II; the fact that she and Alice B. Toklas survived the war has prompted some to suggest she did so by contributing to fascism in Europe. Female and purportedly a "bad" Jew, Stein is still treated by many as tangential to the canon of modernism, even as her linguistic inventiveness and contributions to modernist innovation are as indisputable as they are overlooked. …