Tactics of dwelling: alterity and the room in Tender Buttons

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article investigates the problem of dwelling in Gertrude Stein’s collection of prose poems Tender Buttons. Though Stein’s innovative language and depiction of objects and alterity have long been the focus of a scholarly investigation, rarely have critics investigated how Stein’s objects relate to each other, and how her poetic language intervenes on the literary construction of spatial relationships. Drawing principally on Martin Heidegger and Michel de Certeau, this paper investigates Stein’s employment of a tactical approach to dwelling.