User:DeRossitt/Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises: 1923–1934

Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises: 1923–1934 is a 2003 book by literary scholar Ulla E. Dydo with William Rice.

Overview
Text

Reception
Richard J. Murphy in The Review of Contemporary Fiction: Dydo, whose work follows Stein's composition from "An Elucidation" (1923) through Lectures in America (published 1935), allows the reader to look over her shoulder as she reads, reflects upon, and responds to them within their own context.

True of composition of both experience and writing for Stein, it requires Dydo to attempt to measure the flow across years, revealing interconnections between and illumination from the texts and their sources.

Dydo's footnotes comment on the scholarly work, further uncover detail, and support the careful rendering of her Steinian reading experience. The whole offers a stunning view of a first-rate scholar at work and an indispensable study of this most difficult of the great modernist writers.

In her 2003 Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises, Dydo examines how Stein destroys “referential leads” and “prevents the intrusion of incidental personal detail” in order to bring attention to the composition itself (18). Radical decontextualization undercuts patriarchal certainties of time, person, and place.

Janet Malcolm's book discusses The Language That Rises

Amy Feinstein in Shofar

Logan Esdale in Modernism/Modernity

John Whittier-Ferguson in Modernism/Modernity "No one has done more to advance our understanding of Stein's most challenging texts than Ulla Dydo, a Professor Emerita at the City University of New York who knows better than anyone else alive Stein's published work and the extensive archive of Stein's papers housed at the Beinecke library at Yale."

"And now, with Dydo's ambitious new book on the most challenging period of Stein's writing, we have an important, extensive study that works year by year, manuscript by manuscript, through everything that Stein wrote in what is arguably the most productive and least studied period of her career.... Only Dydo could have written this book"

"Dydo's project is in an important sense fundamentally inimical to Stein's own.... on page after page Dydo sutures Stein's words to circumstances and recombines finished texts into productions rooted in Stein's daily life."

"And yet an author's objections to a particular interpretive gambit cannot be allowed to foreclose readings, particularly if those readings are productive, as Dydo's almost always are."

Kristin Bergan in Criticism: About the essay "Composition as Explanation" --"In her richly contextualized reading of the lecture and the history of its composition, Ulla Dydo writes that the title “speaks of an idea central to Stein’s work—that compositions are complete only if they are self-explanatory, requiring no interpretations beyond what they are.” The composition, in other words, is its own explanation (much as the New Critical insistence on the autonomy of the aesthetic would have it)."

Lisa Siraganian in Modern Fiction Studies Ambitions of the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas -- "Those ambitions included challenging her brother's previously dominant role in her life and aesthetic philosophy and advertising her close association with Picasso, whose work she could no longer afford to purchase. She also recommits herself to Alice, sitting with the other "wives of geniuses," which may have been causally related to Alice having recently discovered the highly autobiographical manuscript Q. E. D. in a closet and figuring out the identity of Stein's love interest. According to Wanda Corn, Stein thus "put her long partnership with Alice front and center and told the story of their domestic partnership as an unqualified success story" in The Autobiography (211). Ulla Dydo offers substantial evidence to support an alternative chronology of these events (488-5)"