User:DeRossitt/"They Watch Me as They Watch This": Gertrude Stein's Metadrama

"They Watch Me as They Watch This": Gertrude Stein's Metadrama  is a 1991 book by literary scholar Jane Palatini Bowers.

Overview
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Reception
Review by Christopher J. Knight in American Literature: Bowers's is an intelligent and patiently detailed analysis of Stein's dramas, a book which will be required reading for all scholars who have an interest in this facet of Stein's work. If there's a weakness, however, it attaches to the insistence that "the language of the play is the story" (11); that "attention [in the plays] is focused on phonology and orthography, not on meaning" (14); and that "Stein is making the spectator attend to the materiality of language, to its existence as an aesthetic object" (36-37). As description, these observations seem sound, yet Bowers, in addition to stressing the experimental and disruptive qualities of Stein's wordplay, needs to explain better why, if the author's language is conceived as "just a key to itself" (93), others should attend to it?

June Schlueter in The Modern Language Review: "... Bowers's analyses serve as an admission ticket to Stein's dramatic work, classifying apparent purpose and effect. Yet her competent analytic project has the curious effect of flattening an exciting body of work with an anarchistic yet highly formal artistic radicalism. One wonders whether the language of postmodern critical discourse, rather than that of the insistently close reader, would not have served better to contextualize and illuminate the unrelenting inquiry into language, culture, and dramatic form embodied in Stein's prematurely postmodern writing."

Julia Fawcett in Modern Drama: "In her exploration of Stein’s metadrama, Jane Palatini Bowers offers the most complete analysis of the play and one that reverberates, largely unchallenged, in the work of later critics."

Kevin Landis in Theatre Journal: "She highlights Betsy Alayne Ryan's Gertrude Stein's Theatre of the Absolute (1984) and Jane Palatini Bowers's "They Watch Me as They Watch This": Gertrude Stein's Metadrama (1991) as the only two previous full-length studies devoted to the theatre of Stein."