This book offers a bold critical method for reading Gertrude Steins work on its own terms by forgoing conventional explanation and adopting Steins radical approach to meaning and knowledge. Inspired by the immanence of landscape, both of Provence where she travelled in the 1920s and the spatial relations of landscape painting, Stein presents a new model of meaning whereby making sense is an activity distributed in a text and across successive texts. From love poetry, to plays and portraiture, Linda Voris offers close readings of Steins most anthologized and less known writing in a case study of a new method of interpretation. By practicing Steins innovative means of making sense, Voris reveals the excitement of her discoveries and the startling implications for knowledge, identity, and intimacy.
Introduction: The Force of Landscape.- Chapter 1. Making Sense: Steins Radical Epistemology.- Chapter 2. Taking Place in Love Poems.- Chapter 3. Framing Space: The First Landscape Play.- Chapter 4. Dissolving the Frame.- Chapter 5. Portraiture after Landscape.- Conclusion: Relating Chance and Choice.
Linda Voriss The Composition of Sense in Gertrude Steins Landscape Writing is, quite simply, a game-changer for Stein scholarship. This important monograph proposes a radical new critical approach to Steins work & . (Georgina Nugent-Folan, Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature, Vol. 37 (2), 2018)Linda Voris is Associate Professor of Literature at American University, Washington, D.C., USA. Her publications have appeared in
Modernism/modernity,
Studies in American Fiction, and
American Women Poets in the 21st-Century.