S tein, G ertrude

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Gertrude Stein, once considered a minor writer because of her extreme and rather forbidding experimental impulses, is now often ranked among the earliest and most important literary modernists. Her fictional writing style is notable for its use of repetition, non‐standard grammar and punctuation, narrative digressions and disjunctiveness, unsettling narrative tone and authority, and other formal features meant to challenge expectations about the novel as a form, to explore the nature of existential time, and to expand the repertoire of intellectual and emotional effects produced in readers. As a rule, she focuses on humdrum events, including family power struggles and amorous relationships in a domestic context. She also explores how individuals coincide with or deviate from fixed social and racial types. She took her cues from the experimental visual arts – most notably from cubism – as well as from realist and naturalist writers such as Henry James and Gustave Flaubert, in turn influencing numerous younger writers whom she befriended, such as Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and Thornton Wilder. She has impacted and inspired feminist critics and writers, avant garde poets, and artists of the present moment, including members of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school. Her allusions in her work to same‐sex desires and her nearpublic lesbian relationship with Alice B. Toklas have also been a source of interest to theorists of sexuality.