User:DeRossitt/Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein's Postmodernism

Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein's Postmodernism is a 1992 book by literary scholar Ellen E. Berry.

Overview
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Reception
Juliana Spahr in American Literature: Curved Thought and Textual Wandering is a crucial book for the study of Gertrude Stein.

As Berry argues for a reading of Stein as a postrealist, she also reads Stein as a postmodernist. Her argument—that postmodern critical categories are essential to "an understanding of Stein's fictional experiments and, further, to a more accurate understanding of her position within literary history"—is supported by her skillful negotiation of a wide range of postmodernist and feminist criticism (1). The index to this book begins with Kathy Acker and ends with Virginia Woolf, which conveys an idea of the scope of Berry's project. The book concludes with a call to contextualize through Stein "the history of a postmodern literary emergence."

One of the remaining critical necessities is not to throw Gertrude Stein forward into postmodernism, but rather to discuss her later, more difficult work in such a way that she is seen as a crucial and defining writer of modernism. Nonetheless, Berry's book well begins the essential work of taking Stein's later writing seriously.

Paul Hannigan in Harvard Review: Ellen Berry's reading of Gertrude Stein as a post-modernist writer is convinc ing and often brilliant. Her book occasionally strangles on the jargons of post modernist and feminist literary theory, but her readings of some of Stein's most difficult texts?Lucy Church Amiably and Mrs. Reynolds?should convert or at least soften up even those most skeptical of Stein's worth. An excellent book.

Charles Caramello in Modern Fiction Studies: more ambitious study, Berry examines a chronological series of Stein's novels through the optic of postmodernism—or, more precisely, optics, since she uses "postmodern" sometimes to mean "the interpretive strategies applied to a text" and sometimes "the aesthetic features contained within it."

Ultimately, Berry wants to show that Stein's "effort to compose an antirealist version of the novel" was both postmodernist and feminist; and, to achieve her goals, Berry pairs up post modernist perspectives or features with appropriate Stein novels. She lays out the material on postmodernism capably, and she offers new and en gaging readings of Stein's more ignored novels; unfortunately, the unoriginal discussions of postmodernism often eclipse the more original discussions of Stein.

Both of these works have promising conceptions, both contribute to the crucial conversation about Stein's sexuality and her feminism, but both, I think, suffer in execution.

Catharine R. Stimpson in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction: Now Ellen R. Berry has efficiently and tautly projected a postmodernist Stein. Her focus is on Stein's longer, most unconventional, least read narrative fictions, A Long Gay Book rather than Three Lives, Blood on the Dining Room Floor rather than The Autobiography of Alice Toklas. However, as Berry knows, one locks Stein into the box of a genre at one's peril. For this Houdini of literature will escape with a chuckle at critical knuckle-headedness. Her novels will blur fiction, literary theory, cultural speculation, history, love songs, gossip, and a diary. Her narratives seem to move without much aim: moments "converge" and "disperse." In brief, Stein wanders.

Berry's trajectory of Stein's career is more persuasive. Here it does not progress teleologically, but swerves and curves, elements splitting apart and converging, compositions beginning again and again, in a "multiply reconfigurable, nonprogressive accumulation of stylistic and thematic concerns."

Systematically but never schematically, incisively, with an often dazzling agility, Berry then reads some of Stein's non-mimetic texts in order to show her postmodern practices.

Jane Palatini Bowers in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature: Happily, Berry declares herself unwilling to impose on Stein's texts the usual feminist plots—the "modernist plot . . . [of] the woman writer's struggle against . . . patriarchal censors" (p. 13) or the plot of preoedipal play with the "mother tongue" (p. 15), for instance. Berry suggests that if we can confront Stein without "compromising her difference" (p. 34), we will not only be better readers of Stein, but we will also be better feminist critics because Stein's resistant texts will encourage us to construct new theories to account for them. This is precisely what Berry accomplishes in her often impressive book.