User:DeRossitt/Rescued Readings: A Reconstruction of Gertrude Stein's Difficult Texts

Rescued Readings: A Reconstruction of Gertrude Stein's Difficult Texts is a 1992 book by literary scholar Elizabeth Fifer.

Overview
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Reception
Kirk Curnutt in College Literature: These efforts only hint at the range of recent criticism, which, since 1990 alone, has included more than a half-dozen full-length studies and has inspired the republication of several long-ignored writings, including Geography and Plays (1922), A Novel of Thank You (1926), and Last Operas and Plays (1949).

Fifer's study is the most formalist of recent efforts, exploring predominantly posthumous works at the lin guistic and syntactic level. Berry, meanwhile, examines Stein's affinities with post modernism, offering readings of several more obscure novelettes, including A Long Gay Book and Mrs. Reynolds. Finally, Bush integrates Stein in an intellectual history of the twentieth-century alongside Henry Adams and William James, offering in particu lar a precise overview of Stein's theories of narrative (381-410)

Charles Caramell in Modern Fiction Studies Fifer's ensuing argument, built on close readings, has both empirical and formal problems. By reading selected passages rather than texts, and often only heavily elided parts of passages, she fragments further Stein's already highly polysemous body of writing; with that degree of intervention, she not surprisingly finds evidence to confirm her hypothesis. Paradoxically, and her invocation of Kristeva notwithstanding, she never really moves from mimesis to semiosis, but relies, instead, on a dated model of psychoana lytical criticism in which analyst-reader unproblematically decodes analy sand-writer's discourse for hidden signs of psychosexual conflict

Jane Palatini Bowers in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature: Elizabeth Fifer shows no reluctance to impose a feminist plot on Stein's work. This plot, of sublimated lesbian content in a coded text, has been more subtly explored by Richard Bridgman in his indispensable Gertrude Stein in Pieces and by Catharine Stimpson in a se? ries of illuminating essays, and Fifer acknowledges their influence. While no one would deny the sexual content of Stein's texts, I believe Fifer goes too far in making Stein's sexuality her exclusive focus.

This is certainly one message the reader can take away from Stein's work, but unfortunately it reduces her writing to a kind of pathology and her texts to the productions of a divided self. Fifer often writes about Stein s work as though it were not literature, but the transcription of an analysand's free associations.

Fifer's book does Stein a disservice. She did want readers to understand her, as Fifer observes, but this understanding should not, as Fifer's does, diminish Stein's achievement as a writer.