User:DeRossitt/Silence and Narrative: The Early Novels of Gertrude Stein

Silence and Narrative: The Early Novels of Gertrude Stein is a 1986 book by literary scholar Janice L. Doane.

Overview
Text

Reception
Randa Dubnick in American Studies: Doane's Silence and Narratives not only presents skillful readings of Stein's important early narratives, but also recognizes radical assumptions underlying relatively conventional narratives. It argues quietly but convincingly that Stein's radical approach to language is a search for a woman's voice within a genre that rests on patriarchal assumptions.

Michael J. Hoffman in Modern Fiction Studies: "Doane's most important contribution consists in good extended readings of such relatively unstudied works as Q.E.D. and Fernhurst, both of them unpub lished until after Stein's death. She succeeds in showing how Stein circled around a basic set of materials until she refined her subject matter into the "silence" of such works as The Making of Americans. While the readings of Three Lives and The Making oj Americans are good, they do not add much to the many studies we now have. The feminist interpretations lack the sophistication of recent books by Marianne DeKoven and Jayne Walker and the articles of Elyse Blankley and Lisa Ruddick."

Devon Hodges in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature: "9My understanding of feminine textuality has greatly benefitted from discussion with Janice Doane about her unpublished dissertation, "Silence and Narrative: The Early Novels Gertrude Stein," SUNY Buffalo," (163) "The paternal premise of the novel, as Edward Said has pointed out, depends on the novelistic conventions of sequence, finality, and integ? rity.8 The form of the novel is not neutral." (156)

Jennifer Ashton in ELHThe rationale for this shift in Stein's conception of her own literary practice begins to take shape in the differences that separate The Making of Americans, with its built-in theory of composition, from her later redescription of that theory in "The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans," one of the Lectures in America.

Note: For a discussion of this built-in theory and its development within The Americans itself, see Janice L. Doane, Silence and Narrative.)

Priscilla Perkins in Modern Fiction Studies

In order to understand possible implications of this textual strategy, I will focus in particular on the tension I see in Stein's writings between what Michel Foucault identified as two major methods (or "technologies," in his words) of self-fashioning: those involving surveillance and externally imposed discipline, on the one hand, and those "games of truth" by which individuals construct themselves in accordance with their own responses to their cultures' norms of ethical behavior.1 The tension between these technologies—between coercive behavioral norms and acts of discursive resistance—marks points where agency may erupt, especially in Stein's early writings. These texts are continually con cerned with the power that inheres in personal relationships and are ready, I believe, to be treated explicitly in terms of institutional power.2 In the pieces I will discuss, Stein's ideologies of comparison and nor mality rarely have a stable value. However, they almost always work in the service of technologies of self-fashioning, sometimes playfully, sometimes with highly negative consequences for those who come out on the losing end of the comparison.

Janice Doane paves the way for such a reading in the introduction to Silence and Narrative, where she discusses how the Foucauldian idea of "true discourse" might apply to Stein's interest in explanation.