User:DeRossitt/The Making of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein from Three Lives to Tender Buttons

The Making of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein from Three Lives to Tender Buttons  is a 1984 book by literary scholar Jayne L. Walker.

Overview
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Reception
Ray Lewis White in American Literature: But the signal virtue of Jayne L. Walker's study of Gertrude Stein's development as a writer, in contrast to other such studies, is in never losing sight of the fact that Stein was writing with desperate intensity about human character and human experience and never merely inventing games with language. While asserting about Gertrude Stein that "language became her playground," Walker makes clear the humanity of the author and her necessity of writing from her own experiences.

Randa Dubnick in American Studies: Walker skillfully traces Stein's development from the naturalistic fiction of Three Lives to the counter-rationality of Tender Buttons ....

Walker's excellent discussion of Three Lives—one of the most intelligent in Stein scholarship—focuses on Stein's rendering of the speech of inarticulate characters.

Walker joins other critics in recognizing Roman Jakobson's importance in Stein criticism; nonetheless, her book is less a presentation of new theories than a welcome enhancement of existing knowledge through study of the primary texts and Stein's unpublished notebooks. On balance, Walker's book makes a valuable contribution to Stein scholarship, and is most useful for its use of material from the notebook to illuminate how Stein's use of syntax reflects her content.

Cyrena N. Pondrom in Contemporary Literature: Her book has the authority—like DeKoven's—of her fluent command of the materials she brings to bear on Stein, and the added excellence of extensive use of material available only by work with the unpublished Stein manuscripts in the Beinecke Library. In many ways this is the most satisfying book of the group—although DeKoven's stimulating book breaks more new ground.

In large part because she demonstrates the continuity of Stein's artistry with her intellectual background and environment, especially with the artistic theory of C6zanne and the philosophy of William James, Walker's interpretation of the meaning of Stein's artistic evolution is particularly persuasive.

Michael J. Hoffman in Modern Fiction Studies: Walker cares more than I do about whether Stein is adapting the techniques of painting to her writing or is doing a similar thing on her own. Trying to determine the priority here is like trying to decide who invented cubism, Picasso or Braque. The milieu in which Stein did her writing was dominated by the plastic arts, and it is understandable that Stein's creative fertilization came from that direction. The fresh insight that Walker brings to Stein's work is not simply that she shares an equality with Cézanne and Picasso; it is that poststructuralist critical techniques can take us much further than before in understanding Stein's dislocations of genre and language. Walker's sophisticated use of those techniques makes this one of the better recent books on Stein.

Linda Simon in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction:

Because she limits herself to a briefer time span, Walker's examination development from Three Lives to Tender Buttons enables her to put vincing explanation for Stein's motives. Cezanne, Walker found, figures Stein's notebooks at the beginning of that period. Stein's "monumental the problem of realism" parallelled the evolution from impressionism to Cubism.

the process of cognition. Stein's use of repetition, similarly, as a statement about process: history Stein thought, but repetitive; not progressive, but redundant.

But Stein's fascination with her sensory environment, the importance of her cognition for her, needs to be incorpo- rated into any successful theory about her work; and this understanding is more evident in Walker's thesis than in DeKoven's.

Walker, on the other hand, well-grounded in the notebooks that gave rise to Stein's writing for a defined period, offers a lucid argument in explanation of some difficult compositions.

Norman Weinstein in Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature: The generalizations which so liberally pepper this study range from the embarrassingly facile to the intellectually myopic. In a quasi-mystical non sequitur, she dismisses all earlier Stein criticism, claiming that earlier books "short-circuit any serious effort to decipher her texts in their own terms" (xiii). What does Walker do in contrast? She introduces ideas from Matisse, Picasso, linguistic and semiotic thinkers to her Stein explication. In short, she brings to bear upon the Stein corpus as much of a multidisciplinary approach as any other Stein critic. Yet she claims a singular stance for her work.

Dougald McMillan in South Atlantic Review: Walker's reading of Tender Buttons is the most helpful discussion of any of Stein's works I have encountered. Reading it, that difficult collection became straight- forward and almost immediately comprehensible. It became for the first time for me an aesthetically cogent piece of literature and not just the subject matter for my own academic enterprise. I am grateful to Jayne Walker for that. All in all, these are an unusually reliable, informative, and valuable 167 pages.

Catharine R. Stimpson in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature: "Walker, in a few brilliant, succinct sentences, analyzes "Orta or One Dancing," a portrait of Isadora Duncan, written around 1910, as a mark of Steins shift to an association of the female, instead of the male, with creativity."

The users of feminist criticism, DeKoven and Walker, far more openly admire, enjoy, and respect their female subject.

[Walker] handles both literary theory and Stein's texts with wonderful deftness, aplomb, and efficient fluency. Like Stein's best critics, she can convincingly show how the machinery of a particular piece works. Given such virtues, she offers the brightest, most sensitive reading I know of the first decade of Stein's career.