User:DeRossitt/Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis

Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis is a 1990 book by literary scholar Lisa Ruddick.

Overview
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Reception
Margaret Dickie in The Modern Language Review: This is the best book on Gertrude Stein written in a decade of extremely good books on this hitherto much neglected modernist. In a bold stroke, Lisa Ruddick has used the critical vocabulary and insights ofpoststructuralist criticism with its questioning of character and theme to explore Stein's efforts to define her self and to develop a woman-centred spiritual vision of the world.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature: Ruddick's book concerns "the making of Gertrude Stein," and it is immense credit that she constructs lively and provocative analyses, proposing, with reference to theoretical positions such as Kristeva's, why certain word combinations, associations, and puns are present in Stein. Not all of her narratives are as convincing as others; everyone who reads the book may not be as uniformly convinced by each of the chapters. At the same Ruddick also tracks the limits of all "answers," given Stein's ruthless ludic difficulty at this period.

Michael Hoffman in Modern Fiction Studies: Lisa Ruddick, on the other hand, does say something fresh about a number of heavily examined Stein works. She employs poststructuralist theories and techniques of analysis, and she uses materials in the Stein archives at Yale. This is definitely a book for Stein experts and for those interested in neo-Freudian analytic techniques, particularly those of the French feminist school. It is a rich work written in a sinewy style that will reward the careful reader.

Ruddick's Reading Gertrude Stein is a major contribution to our reading of Stein's early works.

Ruddick's readings are quite astute, and they add to our knowledge even though many of these works have been the subject of much commentary. Ruddick's is, I believe, the best reading yet of The Making of Americans, and her interpretation of Tender Buttons is brilliant, incorporating as it does Lacanian insights.

Ruddick's pattern of unabashedly mixing biography and criticism is, I am now convinced, the only way to make sense of Stein's privately encoded meanings.

Linda Wagner-Martin in American Literature: Lisa Ruddick's study gives the reader Gertrude Stein in something that resembles her personal and psychological complexity ... Ruddick's book approaches the problem of reading all of Stein as if it were a possible task, and she comes close.

Ruddick has finally given readers enough information to feel comfortable with both the recoverable content and the enigmatic spaces of Stein's writing.