The Tune of Thinking: Gertrude Stein’s Narration

A radical understanding of modernist medium-specificity would seem to account for Stein’s early abandonment of traditional generic distinctions—or their playful straddling—and the renaming of her medium as writing. The one boundary that then remains to be considered is that between writing and talki...

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Main Author: Abigail Lang
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Association Française d'Etudes Américaines 2015-03-01
Series:Transatlantica
Subjects:
Online Access:https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/7047
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author Abigail Lang
author_facet Abigail Lang
author_sort Abigail Lang
collection DOAJ
description A radical understanding of modernist medium-specificity would seem to account for Stein’s early abandonment of traditional generic distinctions—or their playful straddling—and the renaming of her medium as writing. The one boundary that then remains to be considered is that between writing and talking. Written out to be spoken to an audience, the four lectures that constitute Narration (1935) take up where the Lectures in America left off and intend to think out narrative in relation to knowledge and the possible merging of prose and poetry. Where the early modernist manifestos vied for attention with a bold typography embodying an often outrageous rhetoric, Stein uses other strategies to engage attention. Her rhetoric of emphasis and persistent approximation give rise to a heightened litany, a sustained oral prosody and bring out the pedagogical dimension of her insistence. Both are effects of her commitment to the process of thinking. Although somewhat inconclusive, the Narration lectures constitute one of the rare modernist attempts (with Walter Benjamin’s contemporaneous “The Storyteller”) to rethink—rather than downplay it against collage or abstraction—narration in a discursive direction, thus paving the way for post-war modernism’s embrace of orality as exemplified in John Cage’s Lectures and David Antin’s talk poems.
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spelling doaj-art-422c327435ef417db6d472b951de15d72025-01-30T10:44:15ZengAssociation Française d'Etudes AméricainesTransatlantica1765-27662015-03-01210.4000/transatlantica.7047The Tune of Thinking: Gertrude Stein’s NarrationAbigail LangA radical understanding of modernist medium-specificity would seem to account for Stein’s early abandonment of traditional generic distinctions—or their playful straddling—and the renaming of her medium as writing. The one boundary that then remains to be considered is that between writing and talking. Written out to be spoken to an audience, the four lectures that constitute Narration (1935) take up where the Lectures in America left off and intend to think out narrative in relation to knowledge and the possible merging of prose and poetry. Where the early modernist manifestos vied for attention with a bold typography embodying an often outrageous rhetoric, Stein uses other strategies to engage attention. Her rhetoric of emphasis and persistent approximation give rise to a heightened litany, a sustained oral prosody and bring out the pedagogical dimension of her insistence. Both are effects of her commitment to the process of thinking. Although somewhat inconclusive, the Narration lectures constitute one of the rare modernist attempts (with Walter Benjamin’s contemporaneous “The Storyteller”) to rethink—rather than downplay it against collage or abstraction—narration in a discursive direction, thus paving the way for post-war modernism’s embrace of orality as exemplified in John Cage’s Lectures and David Antin’s talk poems.https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/7047rhetoricoralityaestheticsnarrationtheorypoetry
spellingShingle Abigail Lang
The Tune of Thinking: Gertrude Stein’s Narration
Transatlantica
rhetoric
orality
aesthetics
narration
theory
poetry
title The Tune of Thinking: Gertrude Stein’s Narration
title_full The Tune of Thinking: Gertrude Stein’s Narration
title_fullStr The Tune of Thinking: Gertrude Stein’s Narration
title_full_unstemmed The Tune of Thinking: Gertrude Stein’s Narration
title_short The Tune of Thinking: Gertrude Stein’s Narration
title_sort tune of thinking gertrude stein s narration
topic rhetoric
orality
aesthetics
narration
theory
poetry
url https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/7047
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