User:DeRossitt/A Different Language: Gertrude Stein's Experimental Writing

A Different Language: Gertrude Stein's Experimental Writing is a 19XX book by literary scholar Marianne DeKoven.

Overview
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Reception
Clive Bush in The Yearbook of English Studies: By refusing to locate Stein's work historically within the issues of philosophy, psychology, epistemology, and linguistics with which she was actually engaged, and by asserting her 'experimental' work is essentially 'non-referential,' Marianne DeKoven struggles for a language in which to say nothing of substance.

Marianne DeKoven in Modern Fiction Studies: time. My primary concerns in A Different Language were to demonstrate the connections between Stein's reinventions of literary form and the antipatriarchal theories of Julia Kristeva, which in turn were deeply imbricated in the poststructuralism she shared with Barthes, Derrida, and Lacan, and to argue "against interpretation" (Sontag) by showing how each of Stein's successive experimental styles could and should be read without reducing individual works to "thematic syntheses" (Culler).

Michael Hoffman in Modern Fiction Studies: Not only does DeKoven's method work; her readings of Stein are convincing. She occasionally lapses into categorical statements and repeats certain key phrases, such as "anti-patriarchal," so much that they come to sound like propaganda; but these are minor complaints. Aside from being a good reading of Stein, A Different Language is an excellent statement about literary experimentation and a model for applying poststructuralist critical methods to the reading of texts.

Susan Holbrook in American Literature: What arises out of Stein's rigorous defamiliarization of terms like "wife" or "the man" is the sense that no one ever perfectly "looks like one." In "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," Butler recalls the formative intellectual experience of reading Esther Newton's book about drag, which posits that "drag is not an imitation or a copy of some prior and true gender; according to Newton, drag enacts the very structure of impersonation by which any gender is assumed.... There is no 'proper' gender, a gender proper to one sex rather than another, which is in some sense that sex's cultural property. "3 Such an understanding of gender performativity might serve as a useful corrective to simplistic readings of Stein's identifications. Marianne DeKoven's influential study of Stein, A Different Language, contributes to the body of literature that presumes to know how the poet saw her- self: "Throughout her radically experimental period, therefore, she essentially thought of herself as a man (there is direct evidence of this identification in the notebooks, where Stein says 'Pablo and Ma- tisse have a maleness that belongs to genius. Moi aussi, perhaps')."

Georgia Johnston in Modern Fiction Studies: The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas has eluded the label of experimental writing. Marianne DeKoven, for example, in her formative analysis of Stein's experimental writing, ends her study before the autobiography. Her useful definition of experimental writing—as "the obstruction of normal reading [which] prevents us from interpreting the writing to form coherent, single, whole, closed, ordered, finite, sensible meanings" (Different Language 5)—certainly eliminates the autobiography from that category. The autobiography retains flat, surface, simple, coherent language, nothing like the plurality of meaning in an experimental text like Tender Buttons.6 DeKoven, as do other critics, emphasizes the coherency of the autobiography: it "is in many ways characteristically modernist, with its impressionistic or associative temporal structure, following the course of memory rather than chronology. Its compelling voice is that of Stein's reported conversation: wry, whimsical, a peculiar mix of understatement and exaggeration. It is this voice, coupled with Stein's free-ranging memory of historically interesting personalities and events, which are the core of The Autobiography" (I25).7 DeKoven's accurate and perceptive characterization of the autobiography describes, however, only one version of this text. As Stein did with her coterminously written autobiography Stanzas in Meditation, with its doubled messages—one for herself (and Alice Toklas) and one for strangers8—Stein presents two reading positions within the one text. She produces a text that can be read as if unified and bounded by its textual frame and a text that can be read as if it were the origin of a web of other readings, which a reader—while reading the autobiography—might read outside the boundary of The Autobiography. The first type of reading is one which marks the reader as stranger; the second type of reading positions the reader as intimate of Stein, not through knowledge of Stein's private life, but through an economy of "one completely telling stories that were charming, completely listening to stories having a beginning and a middle and an ending" ("Ada" 16)9

Robert Merrill in American Literature: DeKoven is very good at showing the different ways in which Stein violated grammatical conventions at different points in her career. I think she is far less successful in proving that Stein's "incoherence" is an admirable rejection of "the culturally ascendent language of the Father."

Margueritte S. Murphy in Contemporary Literature: Marianne DeKoven argues that interpretation for meaning transgresses the intent and polysemous nature of Stein's language.

It has been popular recently among readers of Tender Buttons to analyze Stein's assault on the word of the father, patriarchal, logocentric discourse; Marianne DeKoven's work in this area is especially intelligent and provocative.

Cyrena N. Pondrom in Contemporary Literature: Marianne DeKoven's A Different Language: Gertrude Stein's Experimental Writing is first-rate. Clearly grounded in theory, it offers an order to the tangled web of Stein's writing which enables the reader to approach her work systematically, without ignoring or treating reductively the appearance of more than one style in a single work.

But DeKoven is, I believe, the first to argue explicitly that homogeneous significance inheres in a compendium of all the sections of Stein's work written in a single style, rather than in a single work written in two or more styles; and that, say, a "portrait" and a prose poem written in the same style have more claim to be discussed together than two portraits written in different styles.

DeKoven is enabled to approach Stein without trying to find coherent "meaning" in single works by the critical theory with which she frames her argument.

Linda Simon in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction: DeKoven, focusing on various short pieces written from 1906 to 1932, believes that Stein's prose results from her subversion of patriarchal literary conventions: that is, modes of writing that -are "linear, orderly, closed, hierarchical, sensible, coherent, referential, and heavily focused on the signified." Instead, Stein's modes are "incoherent, open-ended, anarchic, irreducibly multiple...."

While DeKoven adeptly separates successful from unsuccessful works in Stein's large body of experimental writing, she does not admit that Stein may have been conducting different experiments, that the motivation for Tender Buttons, for example, may have been different from that of Stein's Mallorca pieces; that Tender Buttons may have been an attempt—however much that attempt failed—to "see" in a Cubist mode; and that the Mallorca pieces may be an intentionally obscure diary, an intimate "conversation" with her sole audience at the time, Alice Toklas.

Catharine R. Stimpson in boundary 2: Marianne DeKoven, for example, carefully distinguishes between two languages: conventional, patriarchal speech, and an experimental, anti-patriarchal speech. The former celebrates the triumph of the male over the female; the post-Oedipal over the pre- Oedipal; the linear over the pluridimensional; the signified over the signifier. Stein is the great "experimental" writer in English—less because she was female as such than because she rejected the repressions of the privileged patriarchal language and located herself in the far less fortunate position of woman, waiting for her own public language.32 Because Stein was a woman, living with another woman, she might have more easily recovered pre-Oedipal space than if she had been a man or a heterosexual woman. Nevertheless, DeKoven correctly says, femaleness alone is neither a necessary nor a sufficient guarantee of experimental writing.

Catharine R. Stimpson in Poetics Today: DeKoven ... persuasively analyze[s] Stein as an anti-patriarchal writer

Catharine R. Stimpson in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature: DeKoven believes that language can articulate alogical, agrammatical realities. However, because DeKoven has other theoretical guides, like Julia Kristeva, and other ambitions, she pictures still another Stein. Boldly genderizing language, she compares "patriarchal" to "experimental" writing. The former is objective, orderly, lucid, linear, masterful, and coherent. The latter is anarchic, undifferentiated, indeterminate, multiple, and open-ended (xvii). The former is the language of the powerful fathers; the latter is the language of those who have been as powerless as the mothers and/or of those who remember the pre-Oedipal presence of the mother's body.