Stein's Tender Buttons Research Articles

Random poetry?: Reading chance, randomness and the non-compressible in Gertrude Stein and John Cage

ABSTRACT The latter half of the twentieth century saw increasing interest in the production of aleatoric, ‘chance-determined’ texts. The writing of poetry outside of simplistically naturalised ‘intentional’ paradigms was not of course new, being common to the early century's ‘automatic writing’ and ancient oracular traditions alike; but poets writing in the twentieth century developed new anti-intentional methods under the sign of process philosophies and cybernetics, and mediated by new printing and computing technologies. The immediate reaction many of these texts evince is a sense of their ‘randomness’, their resistance to settled orders of symbol, rhetoric and signification, and to established protocols of reading. This essay asks what ‘randomness’ might mean in a poetic context. It considers the term's changing use across history, particularly in interaction with ‘chaos’, and outlines the information-theoretical definition of randomness as non-compressibility, drawing an analogy between this and the problem of poetry and paraphrase. How might this framework help in reading seemingly ‘random’ poetry? Taking examples from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons and John Cage's Empty Words, the essay delineates some distinctions between the happenstantial, the procedural and the truly random in writing, and considers some consequences for the theory and practice of literary criticism.

‘Ill buttoned’ : Comparing the representation of objects in Samuel Beckett'sIll Seen Ill Saidand Gertrude Stein'sTender Buttons

This article argues for a reconsideration of Gertrude Stein's influence on the development of Samuel Beckett's aesthetics of language, together with the overall comparability of their work. The article will demonstrate that when read through the context of Beckett's observations on Stein in the 1937 German letter, their respective approaches towards the same operation, namely the logographic representation of a word in other words, is highly comparable. The article forwards Stein's Tender Buttons as a text that can be considered highly compatible with Beckett's observations on Stein in the German letter and argues for a reconsideration of the avenues through which Beckett may have encountered Stein's work, specifically in relation to the magazine transition. The article subsequently compares Stein's representation of objects in Tender Buttons (published in transition 14), with excerpts from Beckett's Murphy and Watt, followed by an extended analysis of Ill Seen Ill Said.

'A cook book to be read. What about it?': Alice Toklas, Gertrude Stein and the Language of the Kitchen

This essay analyses the way that the writings of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas use food as part of a poetics of intimacy and argues that the continuity between art and the everyday in Stein's Tender Buttons (1914) and in The Alice B Toklas Cookbook (1954) can be read as a trace of the way that both women acted as the constant and moving background to each other's lives and texts. The paper proposes that Toklas's highly involved, expensive and often impractical recipes provide a meditation on wider and more complex desires than just bodily hunger, particularly at the time of Toklas and Stein's stay in occupied France and after Stein's death in 1946 when Toklas wrote the Cookbook to avoid having to sell Stein's collection of early twentieth century masterpieces. The paper finds antecedents for both the quality of 'obstinate and homely shrewdness' in Stein and Toklas's texts in the brusque and authoritative women's voices captured in nineteenth century cookbooks and suggests that through the fetish status of the nouns in both recipes and in poetry Gertrude and Alice use the reciprocal making and writing of food to articulate, represent and direct desire.

“Spinal Irritation” and Fibromyalgia: A Surgeon General and the Three Graces

“Spinal Irritation” and Fibromyalgia: A Surgeon General and the Three Graces

Color Coded

Marowitz continuedfrom previous page and the examples (drawn sometimes from obscure sources) emerge relevant to the issues under discussion . It is something of a miracle to have been lodged for many years in both Yale and Harvard and still emerge sounding like a "mensch"—i.e., pertinent and accessible. In 1965, Brustein was approached by the New York Times to become its lead drama critic. "Flattered as I was by the proposal," writes Brustein, "daily reviewing was clearly not in my future. In those days, theatre notices had to be completed between the falling of the curtain and the rising of the sun, and I was technically unable to write a review in two hours." Stanley Kaufman was given the job, and Brustein went off to greener fields. I often conjecture what kind of American theatre we might have had if, in those palmy days of the swinging 60s, Brustein had become the omnipotentNew York Times theatre critic. What glories were trampled, innovations squelched, opportunities squandered because he took a pass? Charles Marowitz is a stage-director, playwright, and critic whose latestplay Silent Partners, based on Eric Bentley's The Brecht Memoir (1985), recently premiered in Washington, D. C. in 2006. His latest book is How to Stage a Play, Make a Fortune, Win a Tony, & Become a Theatrical Icon (Amadeus, 2005). Color Coded Fred Muratori reoyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge Harryette Mullen Graywolf Press http://www.graywolfpress.org 176 pages; paper, $15.00 In the introduction to Blue Studios (2006), her collection ofessays on the cultural work undertaken by experimental women poets and by feminist readings of their poetry, Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues for the practice of sociopoesis, which she defines as "the analysis ofpoetry by helixed social and aesthetic concerns." Grounded in the writings of Theodor Adorno, particularly the thesis of his seminal essay "On Lyric Poetry and Society," DuPlessis recognizes poetry as "a theorizing practice, a practice of thinking, and as a commitment to the thought that emerges in the subtle concreteness of segmented, saturated language." Given her emphasis on poetry's symbiotic (ifsometimes unconscious) relationship to social dynamics—its binary function as vehicle for theory and praxis—and her concern for feminism in particular, it comes as a surprise that one will not find "Mullen, Harryette" listed among the names referenced in the book's index. The three collections gathered in Mullen's Recyclopedia—Trimmings (1991), S*PeRM**K*T (1992), and Muse & Drudge (1995)—directly engage , in Adorno's words, "the social nature of lyric poetry" by triggering the transformative effects of "saturated" language within the public contexts of gender, race, consumerism, and popular media. They channel vocabularies from multiple cultural streams, histories, economies, and wisdoms: synthesizing , catalyzing, even skewing once-familiar expressions into new propositions for reassessing what we're reading almost simultaneously with the reading of it. Having acknowledged the problematic nature of subjectivity in an interview conducted after the publication ofMuse & Drudge (Callaloo, 19.3), Mullen seems to heed Adorno's admonition in "Subject and Object" that the subject too easily forgets "how much it is an object itself." Her poems for the most part allow language to assemble a lyric "I," which, though diffused through a dense, associative range oflinguistic possibilities, is reconstituted in the readers 's recognition ofthe singularhuman consciousness (Adorno's "precisely specifying cast of thought") governing their meticulous construction. Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T were intended as reactions to (or "interactions" with) the first two sections of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons (1914) ("Objects" and "Food"), and as Mullen wrote in her original afterword to Trimmings (not reprinted in Recyclopedia), "I thought about language as clothing and clothing as language." "Trimmings" might apply to objects that are added to a whole, or else pruned from it, and even abstract elements—such as color—may be extracted and reified, as Mullen's prose poem on a red dress demonstrates: When a dress is red, is there a happy ending. Is there murmur and satisfaction. Silence or a warning. It talks the talk, but who can walk the walk. Distress is red. It sells, shouts, an urge turned inside out. Sight for sore eyes, the...

Presence, Deixis, and the Making of Meaning in Gertrude Stein'sTender Buttons

Presence, Deixis, and the Making of Meaning in Gertrude Stein's<i>Tender Buttons</i>

Presence, Deixis, and the Making of Meaning in Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons

Presence, Deixis, and the Making of Meaning in Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons

Amy Gerstler’s Rhetoric of Marriage

Amy Gerstler's many poems dealing with romance and weddings ironize customs of patriarchal marriage and, in an allied project, norms of lyric and narrative discourse. (1) In retelling and subverting some familiar marital stories, texts reconfigure storytelling itself, pointing toward new spaces and new opportunities for both amatory relations and textuality. Although Gerstler's scrolling texts tell stories of a sort, they are disjointed ones, filled with hints, echoes, innuendoes, and black holes. Stylistically, they seem inspired by Gertrude Stein, evoking plot of language more than a plot of character and event; one might say they try to recreate Browning's My Last Duchess in manner of Stein's Tender Buttons. These poems, then, ward off any attempts to impose a coherent interpretive schema on them. They remain a field of implications, their lively, witty, and overtly artificial style contrasting to morose marital melodramas their images often suggest. If poems hint at uncertainties and brutalities of love and ask how and why women and girls have been cast as custodians of everyday existence (Smith and Gerstler 1), they obliquely suggest nervous anxiety of our relations with language as well. Like other postmodern texts, particularly those influenced by Language movement, Gerstler's prose poems foreground play of language and invite reader to participate in construction of meanings that are always contingent. These poems invite reader to recall, however vaguely, precursory cultural texts that they revise and ironize. At same time, each sentence and section of a Gerstler text does not quite issue seamlessly from one that came before. This slight amnesia, this sense of narrative disruption, places reader in difficult position of straining both to remember and to start over. Things resist complete understanding, and poems thus interfere with an Enlightenment logic of linear narrativity, opening new spaces of collaborativity, bafflement, and ironized knowledge in which reader's awareness is invited to roam. By bending and reversing their precursory texts and by breaking bond between sentences and sections, Gerstler's poems reverse anxiety Plato expressed in Phaedrus: that because writing provides a better means of preserving information than does orality, it threatens to render human memory itself obsolete. Gerstler's poems highlight problematics of written discourse, requiring yet thwarting operations of both memory and understanding. In manner of scrolling news programs and commercials on TV or refreshable pages on Internet, Gerstler's texts mobilize and highlight elements of dissonance, juxtaposition, seriality, periphrasis, parataxis, and non sequitur. And just as her poems formally resemble electronic media (or malls), so they embed shards of prior texts (or products), materials ranging from Hebrew Scriptures, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot to fairy tales, infomercials, Walt Disney films, and Norman Rockwell souvenirs. These poems illustrate Marjorie Perloff's claim that in postmodern texts, the discourses of and mass media are not merely exchangeable; rather theirs is a relationship of enormous variation and complexity (xiii). The poems inscribe themselves sideways into a network of incommensurate narratives, images, and lyric moments. Gerstler has explained that she loves poetic energy that comes from the attempt to marry literary and popular culture--'high' and 'low' art (What Is 2). She tries in her poetry to deploy irrepressible melodramatics of American English ... with its distinctive mixture of slang and preachiness, elevated and silly, heady and democratic, lofty and colloquial, reverence and irreverence, straightforward and shifty. (1) If Stein's language is situated between representation and abstraction, as Peter Nicholls has said (119), Gerstler's appears to be located midway between popular culture and avant garde. …

The Sacramental Dada of T.S. Eliot

THE COMPAKATIST THE SACRAMENTAL DADA OF T. S. ELIOT Sean Cotter Eliot's baptism and confirmation in the Anglican Church in 1927 is usually taken to mark a conversion, not only in his spiritual life, but also in his aesthetics. This year divides the "early" from the "late" Eliot, the author of "Prufrock" and The Waste Land from the author ofAsh- Wednesday and Four Quartets, the ironic avant-garde ventriloquist from the dogmatic czar of letters. Helen Gardner's statement is exemplary: The change in Mr Eliot's poetry cannot be discussed without reference to the fact that the author ofAsh Wednesday is a Christian while the author of The WasteLandwas not. Nobody can underrate the momentousness for any mature person ofacceptance ofall that membership ofthe Christian Church entails. (103) While it is not clear what all is entailed, we can hear in "momentousness " the solemn tone reserved for this moment in Eliot's life, as though he has made a desperate and possibly fatal choice. I will argue that we are mourning a false sense ofrupture. We know from his Harvard notebooks (Gordon 537-8) and from poems such as "The Love Song of St. Sebastian" that Eliot wrestled with Christian belief throughout his life, and 1927 marks his public avowal of this commitment. Eliot's statement ofbeliefdoes not, however, mark his withdrawal from the avant-garde. In fact, this statement shows the depth of his involvement with that particular faction called Dada. Eliot was not a Dadaist in that he did not perform at the Cabaret Voltaire, he did not contribute to Dada journals, and he did not write or sign any of the many Dada manifestos. But we can understand the dynamics of his Anglican beliefs more accurately if we see them as an extension of this continental avant-garde tradition. As Ronald Bush and Denis Donoghue both argue, Eliot's poetry does undergo a change, beginning with Ash-Wednesday (1930), his first long poem published after 1927. This poem moves his aesthetics closer to, not further from, those of the Dadaists Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara. In it Eliot employs the aesthetic nonsense ofDadaist goading as a structural technique, making his Christianity not into a solemn funeral but into a music-hall comedy. Eliot must have expected, when For Lancelot Andrewes was published , the overwhelmingly hostile reaction that his preface would evoke. For example, Eugene Jolas (the editor of transition, publisher ofJoyce's Work in Progress and Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons) called Eliot "senile" and assumed that he had given up literary creation: The gratuitous act ofthe creator having become apparently abhorrent to him, Mr. T.-S. Eliot constrains his reformatory forces into the straightjacket of political and religious dogma. Although I retain a profound Vol. 26 (2002): 69 THE SACRAMENTAL DADA OF T. S. ELIOT admiration for the great poet that he was, and although I try to have tolerance for another man's viewpoint, I cannot help feeling that Mr. Eliot has committed intellectual treason. (11) The extremity of this reaction, with its strange emphasis on allegiance to a cantankerous and factional avant-garde, was not confined to Jolas. The Times Literary Supplement called Eliot "a kind of traitor" (Gordon 226). Ezra Pound rhymed "psychosis" with an accusation that Eliot "abandoned the muses for Moses." Mark Van Doren summarized the Eliot "legend" a year later: Mr. Eliot[. . .]has withered into a triple faith, hardened into a three-headed dogma—turned a fastidious, tired back upon our glorious confusion and gone the easy, empty way ofabsolutism. The author of"The Waste Land," people say, has repudiated even his vision ofour contemporary intellectual desert—a vision which was useful at least in that it showed us what we are—in honor ofmeaningless formulas from old time which he alone mumbles, thinking thereby to achieve impossible certitudes. (590) Eliot was seen as isolating himself from the avant-garde: he is not part of"our" confusion but states formulas "he alone mumbles." Blind as these critics were to the fact that Eliot was not alone in a church which dated from the English Renaissance, they also missed the fact that he had not left the avant-garde...

Hypertext and the Teaching of Modernist Difficulty

T. S. Eliot (1963: 112), who famously declared in 1921 that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult, made difficulty a badge of modernist honor. The attitudes of academic criticism since then might be categorized according to their degree of acceptance or rejection of this premise. New Criticism, by and large, made a virtue of difficulty, measuring poetic achievement in terms of the poet's management of tension and paradox. Conversely, recent criticism has often looked askance at difficulty, suspecting that it may be a form of mystificatory elitism or an instance of dishonestly evasive impersonality. However one chooses to view the matter theoretically, difficulty is an inescapable dimension of modernist texts, especially those that exemplify high-modernist experimentation -- Eliot's The Waste Land, Pound's Cantos, Joyce's Ulysses, Barnes's Nightwood, Stein's Tender Buttons, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Toomer's Cane, Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy -- in short, many of the most frequently taught works in the curriculum of twentieth-century literature. This essay proposes that hypertext is a practical, though partial, solution to the nearly insuperable problems associated with reading and teaching the difficult modernist text. Because my students and I have created and studied with a hypertext of Pound's Canto 81, my examples are drawn primarily from that poem. The hypertextual version of this Canto provides access not only to the poem's information but to Pound's working methods, his aims in writing this including history, and his presentation of the poem as covert and overt pedagogy.

SPEECH FROM THE MARGIN: GERTRUDE STEIN1S TENDER BUTTONS AND AGÁTA GORDON’S KECSKERÚZS

The various feminist projects converge on the idea that language (constructed in its largest sense, as the varied system of discourses through which the world becomes constructed) is the primary cultural agency through which the masculine dominates and represses the feminine. To effect a change at all, it is necessary to undermine language from within, or to mark the ways in which language reveals its own undermining. In much feminist thought, language is understood as a wholly phallogocentric and monolithic domain, which has no place for the ihwomanli who becomes in her difference and otherness the figure for all that remains repressed and silenced. 1 I am analyzing two works by women writers that foreground the issues of marginality and textuality. They belong to different literary traditions: Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons to the American modernist, and Agata Gordon's Kecskeruzs to the contemporary Hungarian literary context. The reason I read them together is that they both address the problem of ide...

Unlikely Modernism, Unlikely Postmodernism: Stein's Tender Buttons

Journal Article Unlikely Modernism, Unlikely Postmodernism: Stein's Tender Buttons Get access Nicola Pitchford Nicola Pitchford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Literary History, Volume 11, Issue 4, Winter 1999, Pages 642–667, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/11.4.642 Published: 01 December 1999

The International Avant-Garde 1905-1924. Spec. no. of Forum for Modern Language Studies 32:2 (review)

Book Reviews Peter Read, ed. The International Avant-Garde 1905-1924. Spec. no. oÃ- Forum for Modern Language Studies 32:2 (April 1996), published for the University of St Andrews by Oxford University Press. A distinguished roster of scholars explores relationships between the visual and verbal arts in the European avant-garde in this far-ranging but focused collection. Read's introduction sets the tone by synthesizing the insights of the papers to follow in an engaging and fresh way, though it is marred by some false notes in the Russian sphere (e.g., the definition of zaum', and including Malevich in a group of painters who are also significant poets). David Gullentops (translation by Read) provides a useful exploration of the relationship between Verhaeren and Marinetti which avoids a bias in favor of one or the other, while not especially deepening our understanding of either writer. Christina Lodder's study of zaum' (transrational language) in Malevich's alogical paintings of 1913-15 is less than satisfying, however. In a literal-minded way, evidently matched by Malevich himself at this stage, she applies Russian Futurist statements about zaum' (drawn here from secondary sources in translation) to paintings Malevich did not describe as "zaumny," while inexplicably passing over those slightly later (and to my eyes better) ones that he did so label. She comes to the conclusion that the "illogical" combination of objects and styles in the paintings corresponds to similar effects in the poetry of Kruchenykh. But her commentary on Malevich, though it is perceptive, is not matched by a familiarity with Kruchsnykh's work. It may be that the principles of zaum' in language do not transfer to painting as easily as Malevich or Lodder assume. Her elaborate explanation of the phrase "Mlody Anglik" scrawled on the back of An Englishman in Moscow misses the obvious point that this is simply Polish for "young Englishman" (Malevich's parents spoke Polish at home). The remaining articles are all quite interesting and successful. Marjorie Perloffs careful comparison of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons (1914) with Duchamp's readymades of the same period illuminates many hidden connections (Stein professed not to be very interested in Duchamp's art), making the link between the two now seem inevitable. Willard Bohn provides an insightful, detailed analysis of the one figure poem by Catalan modernist Santiago Ru sin ol, "Retrat futurista" (1917), revealing it to be a minor masterpiece of political commentary. At the same time he provides us with a clear strategy for reading such works. Renée Riese Hubert gives us a fascinating, exhaustive analysis of Kandinsky's Klänge as a complex masterpiece of the modernist bookwork balanced between art and writing by one artist. This is coupled with a briefer commentary on Kokoschka's Die träumenden Knaben. What is especially pleasing in this model set of articles is the effort to give the chosen works close attention without immediately jumping to broad but unfounded conclusions. In fact, the lesson here is that commonplace views are off the mark in these cases. The collection ends with Anna Balakian's historical survey of the Paris journal Littérature (1919-1924) as a paradigm of the avant-garde. Her nuanced examination allows her to draw some striking comparisons with the avant-garde of the end of our century. Gerald J. Janecek University of Kentucky 120 Fall 1996 ...

The Patient Particulars: American Modernism and the Technique of Originality.

This literary history focuses on four texts -- Stein's Tender Buttons, Hemingway's In Our Time, Williams's Spring and All, and Moore's Observations -- examining the way in which the relation between word and world seems to have lost its quality of necessity and is itself consequent upon the modernists' own prior project to bridge the gap.

Textual Bodies: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Print.

Examining the unusual typography in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Stein's Tender Buttons, Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and Gass's Willie Master's Lonesome Wife, Kaufmann shows how these writers exposed the printed surface of their works and eventually made the print a part of the fiction itself.

A tradition of subversion: the prose poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery

From its inception in 19th-century France, the prose poem has embraced an aesthetic of shock and innovation rather than tradition and convention. In this suggestive study, Marguerite S. Murphy both explores the history of this genre in Anglo-American literature and provides a model for reading the prose poem, irrespective of language or national literature. Murphy argues that the prose poem is an inherently subversive genre, one that must perpetually undermine prosaic conventions in order to validate itself as authentically other. At the same time, each prose poem must to some degree suggest a traditional prose genre in order to successfully subvert it. The prose poem is thus of special interest as a genre in which the traditional and the new are brought inevitably and continually into conflict. Beginning with a discussion of the French prose poem and its adoption in England by the Decadents, Murphy examines the effects of this association on later poets such as T.S. Eliot. She also explores the perception of the prose poem as an androgynous genre. Then, with a sensitivity to the sociopolitical nature of language, she draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to illuminate the ideology of the genre and explore its subversive nature. The bulk of the book is devoted to readings of William Carlos Williams' Kora in Hell, Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons', and John Ashbery's Three Poems. As notable examples of the American prose poem, these works demonstrate the range of this genre's radical and experimental possibilities.

The Case of Cummings

References to E.E. Cummings's relationship with the early twentiethcentury avant-garde are usually rather hurried, and limited to suggesting that the poet felt the influence of Symbolist techniques (absolute metaphor), of Ezra Pound's Rispostes (1912), and perhaps of the linguistic experimentalism of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons (1914); or alternatively, that he owed much to the Dada and Surrealist movements; or again that he was influenced by the lesson of the Cubists, with regard both to the fragmentation of form and to the use of ugly realistic elements that were traditionally considered unpoetic. Futurism is never mentioned: there is at most some passing reference to Apollinaire's Calligrammes. And yet the most superficial glance at Cummings's singular poetic production, from his earliest publications onwards, will be sufficient to gain the precise Impression of an experience analogous to that of the manifestos of Marinetti, and above all to that of the far more important period of Russian Cubofuturism. The reasons for the lack of interest in this question. are, I believe, of a strictly positivistic nature. Not only did Cummings never speak of such influences, but he often insisted that he had invented everything for himself. We have no documents testifying to readings, to meetings, to sympathies. It is not enough, however, to trust in the declarations of poets and in an exclusively causal philology. Documentary evidence does not exhaust the complex problems of culture; the view of facts as a chain of proven relationships, of causes and effects, of sources and borrowings, is on the whole, if elected as an end in itself, somewhat ingenuous. There may arise among artists, thinkers and scientists relationships that one might define as synchronically parallel, but which do not lend themselves to objective documentation. This is due to the fact that the diachronic history of a culture is a dialectic

Spreading the Difference: One Way to Read Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons

Whether she is known as the Mother Goose of Montparnasse, the mama of dada, the affectionate mother country called Gert by G.I.s in Paris, or Baby, as her companion Alice called her in private, makes little difference to our reading of Gertrude Stein's work. Yet the phenomena of Gertrude Stein's versatile selves-none and all and more than the above-and her perception of the differences between herself and the selves of others do. In Tender Buttons1 these differences are as important as the identifications. At least this is one way to read it, and the one I intend here, although of course there is no one way to read it that can fathom a final difference. The spaces are exceptionally wide