By Barbara Will
Gertrude Stein usually referred to as herself a genius, yet what did this time period fairly suggest for her? Stein's claims to genius are mythical, showing usually all through her texts and public lectures. have been they the symptoms of over the top egotism, of determined self-advertisement, or of whatever else completely? This e-book examines the centrality and the specificity of the belief of 'genius' to Stein's paintings and to the cultured beliefs and contradictory highbrow affiliations of excessive modernism commonly. via a chronological studying, it maps Stein's flow from an early funding in a necessary and essentializing proposal of 'genius' to her later use of the time period to explain an anti-essentialist, democratic textual approach. It considers how this revisionary inspiration of 'genius' got here to correspond with Stein's id of herself as Jewish, queer and American. And it ends with Stein's likely paradoxical determination to name a textual content approximately being a genius in the USA, Everybody's Autobiography. Drawing upon
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Extra info for Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of 'Genius'
Example text
To what extent is Stein’s portrayal of African-Americans in that work an effect of her early anxieties over the relationship between knowledge, authority, and a racialized “bottom nature”? 29 “Race” is clearly an issue in Melanctha, but that this issue might emerge from Stein’s fraught relationship to her own racial identity is a potentially contentious point. 31 After her move to Paris and with the start of her literary career, Stein made few explicit references to Jews or Judaism, even in her private notebooks; her occasional nickname for Alice Toklas, “my little Hebrew,” suggests that it was Toklas who for Stein carried the “Jewish” traits.
Experience is remoulding us every minute,” William James has written; this is the process of self-making and unmaking to which the “consciousness without memory” bears witness. ”8 The “old ways” within which knowledge becomes codified are synonymous for James with the notion of “habit” – the “automatic” actions performed in the service of efficiency and expediency, the learned behavior, idées reçues, or clichés which enable the world to go about its business. ” Knowledge, once attained, becomes rigid doctrine; creativity and the desire to learn fall by the wayside.
Stein makes it clear from the start of Melanctha that “race” is central to the character “types” with which both narratives are so centrally concerned. D. ”48 Similarly, in the opening pages of Melanctha “race” and “type” are inextricable. Intelligence, curiosity, sensuality, and “sweetness” are linked to lighter skin tones, while “real black[ness]” is correlated with coarseness, virility, stupidity, laziness, and childishness. Where these traits are mixed, as in Rose, brought up by a white family, “character” still comes down to a fundamentally racialized “bottom nature”: “Her white training had only made for habits, not for nature.
