User:DeRossitt/Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens

Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens is a 2005 book by literary scholar Dana Cairns Watson.

Overview
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Reception
Ann K. Hoff in Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal: In Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens, Watson observes Stein's "incremental repetition," which reveals her "openness to revision based on further experience, including the experience of having said it and heard it and thought it one more time" (7). Watson attributes Stein's repetition to James's influence and believes "Stein's work is in the vein of this type of pragmatism" (7).

Kate Mcloughlin in Journal of American Studies: Dana Cairns Watson proposes an exciting critical agenda: to excavate the "deep structures" (61) of conversation in Gertrude Stein's works and thereby to reveal a radical political discourse with the potential to change self and nation. It sounds an intriguing and worthwhile project: unfortunately—perhaps unsurprisingly, given its ambition—it does not quite come off.

The sections on William James's thinking and Stein's own research in neurophysiology and possible aphasia provide thought-provoking suggestions as to her stylistic motivations. If the argument for her conversational " deep structures " is ultimately unconvincing, the book can nevertheless be recommended as good, clear textual analysis of Stein's oeuvre. As such, it will be a welcome resource for students.

Barbara Will in Modern Fiction Studies: Much of the book attempts to model, through elegant and careful close readings, the peculiar demands, pleasures, and freedoms of conversing with Stein's texts. Watson is adept at eliciting the semantic, syntactic, and grammatical nuances of Stein's words; she is also attuned to the multiple levels of Stein's most experimental texts, showing how Stein's "conversational" texts are also themselves theoretical exercises: conversations about conversations.

Yet ultimately Gertrude Stein and the Essence of What Happens fails to break much new ground, or to offer us a fully satisfying picture of Stein and her work.