Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of 'Genius' / / Barbara Will.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Edinburgh University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2013-2000
• VerfasserIn: Will, Barbara,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2000
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (224 p.)

GBS_insertPreviewButtonPopup('ISBN:9780748611980);Gertrude Stein frequently called herself a genius, but what did this term really mean for her? Stein's claims to genius are legendary, appearing frequently throughout her texts and public lectures. Were they the signs of excessive egotism, of desperate self-advertisement, or of something else entirely? This book examines the centrality and the specificity of the idea of 'genius' to Stein's work and to the aesthetic ideals and contradictory intellectual affiliations of high modernism in general. Through a chronological reading, it maps Stein's move from an early investment in an essential and essentializing notion of 'genius' to her later use of the term to describe an anti-essentialist, democratic textual process. It considers how this revisionary idea of 'genius' came to correspond with Stein's identification of herself as Jewish, queer and American. And it ends with Stein's seemingly paradoxical decision to call a text about being a genius in America, Everybody's Autobiography. Drawing upon a wide range of literary theory, cultural criticism and historical evidence, and offering new readings of previously unexamined texts by Stein, Barbara Will challenges received understandings of Stein's claims to 'genius' and of modernist literary hermeticism by reconceptualising the textual practice of this exemplary modernist writer.Key FeaturesA scholarly study of a writer who is receiving ever-increasing critical attentionThe first major scholarly study to deal with Gertrude Stein's central claim to being a geniusOffers new insight into debates over modernism, mass culture, and postmodernismCombines a historical approach with a theoretical reading inflected by postmodern thinkingOriginal, theoretically informed and consistently well-written.Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of 'Genius' was winner of the Choice Outstanding Academic Title award in 2001."

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations of Works by Gertrude Stein -- Introduction -- Part I: Coming to Terms -- 1 In Search of a Subject: Knowledge and Excess in Stein’s Early Texts -- 2 Self-Naming, Self-Splitting: The Making of a Modernist “ Genius” in The Making of Americans and G.M.P. -- Part II: Congenial Fictions -- 3 “Masterpieces of Yes” : Talking and Listening in “To Call It a Day” and “Forensics” -- 4 Genii Locorum: Expatriate Resolutions in Useful Knowledge -- 5 From “Genius” to Celebrity: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Everybody’s Autobiography -- Coda: Warhol’s Stein -- Selected Bibliography -- Index