The Emergence of Resemblances between People: Stein’s Diagrams in The Making of Americans

Abstract

While recent scholarship on Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans uncovers the historical consciousness buried beneath its taxonomy of human “ kinds,” criticism lacks a vocabulary to link the writing’s abstract and indeterminate forms to its cultural representations. Analyzing the novel and Stein’s studies of others’ behavior through the conceptual lens of linguistic anthropology shows that her aesthetic idiom invokes social forms by emphasizing certain poetic structures of everyday discourse. More specifically, Stein composes Americans around a principle of diagrammatic signification whereby resemblances between people in terms of “ kinds” or “natures” are projected from ritual structures of interaction. For Stein, then, intelligible kinds are a cultural product of repetitive semiotic activity. Recognizing the social and historical currency of the novel’s non-denotational modes of meaning shifts the conversation about her writing further toward a consideration of how its linguistic indeterminacy contributes to a critique of normative social forms.