Ambroży Paulina, (Un)concealing the Hedgehog. Modernist and Postmodernist American Poetry and Contemporary Critical Theories. [O (nie)skrytości jeża: Modernistyczna i postmodernistyczna poezja amerykańska a współczesne teorie krytyczne]. Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, Poznań 2012. Pp. 388. ISBN 978-83-232-2483-9. ISSN 0554-8144. Text in English with a summary in Polish. The book is an attempt to explore the affinities between contemporary critical theories and modernist and postmodernist American poetry. The analysis focuses on poststructuralist theories, notorious for their tendency to destabilize generic boundaries between literary, philosophical and critical discourses. The main argument and the structure of the book derive from Jacques Derrida’s essay “Che cos’è la poesia” [What is poetry?] in which the philosopher postulates the impossibility of defining poetry by comparing a poem to a hedgehog – prickly, solitary, untamed, fragile and protective, rolling itself up into a ball at the first sign of danger or when in the hands of the readerintruder. The metaphor captures thus the fragility of the relationship between poetry and the world. The book examines this relationship as exemplified by the erinaceous poetics of high modernists (William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein) and their postmodernist followers (Bruce Andrews, Rosmarie Waldrop, Charles Bernstein, A.R. Ammons, Susan Howe, Ellen Hinsey) In the study I employ also other poststructuralist theories, such as the notion of the text and the pleasure of the text formulated by Roland Barthes, the theories of metaphor as seen by Paul Ricoeur or Paul de Man, and gender-sensitive theories of Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray.

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Un)concealing the Hedgehog. Modernist and Postmodernist American Poetry and Contemporary Critical Theories

Often regarded as a ‘loose cannon’ within the modernist canon, Gertrude Stein evolved a style of writing that resembles autistic speech patterns and conveys modes of perception which resemble autistic thinking. Through her literary experiments, Stein explores the relationship of modernist abstraction and hermeticism to cultural stereotypes regarding male and female intelligence, as well as their elitist connection to high cultural capital. When Stein exaggerates these hermetic writing techniques, she criticizes the high modernist tendency to glorify male genius and marginalize women artists and intellectuals. When Stein creates a literary style that deliberately problematizes the reader's process of interpretation, she performs as a mind that is oblivious to linguistic and social conventions. By energetically imposing this idiosyncratic use of language, Stein promotes what may, in effect, be termed an autistic ethos of modernism.

Performing mindblindness: Gertrude Stein's autistic ethos of modernism

This essay considers the feminist implications of Gertrude Stein’s sonic devices in the extended prose poem Tender Buttons, a study in persuasive sound that avoids the foreclosures of semantics and grammar through the ephemerality of sound. Situating domestic space and its conversational tones as the sonic context in which Stein produced her work, I explore how she offers collaborative, embodied, and playful communicative strategies that encourage the reader to hear and speak the sounds of her domestic experiences. In Stein’s prose, vocal readers exceed the impositions of written text through performance and linguistic sonorities enabling the sounds of words (as opposed to their meanings) to slip away from static positions. Readers are encouraged to participate in the process of making meaning, to both sound out and listen to the words on the printed page. Stein’s sound writing, in other words, resonates with feminist communication theories that foreground listening, collaboration, experiential kn...

Queer Sonorities: Sound as Persuasion in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons

This chapter presents the data to which the model is applied. Based on critics’ intersubjective agreement, eleven poems by ten authors are chosen. The authors are: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, E.E. Cummings, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Geoffrey Hill, Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein for difficulty; two poems by Mark Strand and John Betjeman provide instead a baseline measure for accessibility. The second part of the chapter outlines two empirical studies that provide the RIDs for a subset of the poems. The first study, a pencil-and-paper task, aims at exploring the degree of comprehension elicited by the poems. In the second, an online reading task, reading times are recorded to measure the resistance opposed by the poems used in the first study.

Organisms of Difficulty: The Data

“Loving was almost always listening”: Sensory collaboration and modes of relation in Gertrude Stein's literary portraits

No matter how complicated anything is, if it is not mixed up with remembering there is no confusion, but and that is the trouble with a great many so called intelligent people they mix up remembering with talking and listening, and as a result they have theories about anything but as remembering is repetition and confusion, and being existing that is listening and talking is action and not repetition intelligent people although they talk as if they knew something are really confusing, because they are so to speak keeping two times going at once, the repetition time of remembering and the actual time of talking but, and as they are rarely talking and listening, that is the talking being listening and the listening being talking, although they are clearly saying something they are not clearly creating something, because they are because they are always remembering, they are not at the same time talking and listening. Do you understand. Do you any or all of you understand. Anyway that is the way that it is. And you hear it even if you do not say it in the way I say it as I hear it and say it [. . .] And does it make any difference to you if you do understand. It makes an awful lot of difference to me. It is very exciting to have all this be. Gertrude Stein, "Portraits and Repetition" (1935) Like much of her writing, Gertrude Stein's prose poem "Patriarchal Poetry" meditates on the limits of a limiting vocabulary. It troubles the presumptive coherence of symbolic discourse in order to acknowledge and enable a vast range of human subjectivity. Always asserting a generative link between modes of language and modes of being, it requires an improvisatory approach to reading and reveals the insufficient arithmetic of patriarchal subjectivity by encouraging its performative remainders. Though consistent with Stein's ongoing interrogation of the relationship between language and identity and language and power, the 1927 piece resists the interpretive approach of even her most agile readers. In fact, Marianne DeKoven, whose subtle and fluid readings have set a standard for Stein scholarship in the last two decades, suggests that "Patriarchal Poetry" is unreadable. She contends that this "lengthy piece [. . .] not only defies interpretation, it defies reading." Its consistent interrogation of the givens of meaning-making approach a kind of limit for DeKoven, finally yielding a text that is not worth reading because its "writing reaches us as blank tedium" (A Different Language 128). In most of Stein's work, as DeKoven and many others have argued, there is a suggestive correspondence on the one hand between play with sound and rhythm and, on the other, the promise of a feminist politics. But in "Patriarchal Poetry," "Stein builds no reiterative, incantatory rhythm, no complex patterns of sound" that might be said to provide an "interpretable feminist thematic content" (128, 129). In dialogue with this frustration, I want to suggest that this poem, which has proven elusive and even irrelevant to many readers, invites us to once again broaden our understanding of what it means to read Stein. To read this piece involves both a hermeneutic pursuit of meaning and a risky engagement with interpretive uncertainty. This risk is most profoundly figured in a reader's willingness to read "Patriarchal Poetry" aloud, for when we do, we generate an unpredictable and heterogeneous phonotext.(1) Brought about by the experimental form of the text and differentially animated by each reader bold enough to give voice to its sequences, such music not only accompanies but periodically overwhelms the definitive search for meaning and suggests epistemologies and modes of subjectivity beyond the horizon of Western patriarchal logic.(2) Make no mistake: reading "Patriarchal Poetry" is very difficult. It repeatedly asks us to imagine new relationships with the words on the page. It confronts us with the fundamental labor of reading by making us work through such passages as this: Never which when where to be sent to be sent to be sent to be never which when where never to be sent to be sent to be sent never which when where to be sent never to be sent never to be sent never which when where to be sent never to be sent never to be sent which when where never to be sent which when where never which when where never which to be sent never which when where to be sent never which when where to be sent which when where to be sent never to be sent never which when where to be sent never which when which when where to be sent never which when where never which when where which when where never to be sent which when where (Yale Gertrude Stein 122) Traditional scansion is of little help. …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.33.1.88

Eric S. Neel

Papers

The Talking Being Listening: Gertrude Stein's "Patriarchal Poetry" and the Sound of Reading