User:DeRossitt/The Public Is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein

The Public Is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein is a 1989 book by literary scholar Harriet Scott Chessman.

Overview
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Reception
Randa Dubnick in MLN: "Harriet Scott Chessman's book presents some extremely interesting and generally convincing new ideas and approaches to reading Stein. According to Chessman, Stein's stylistic development moves away from the traditional univocal model of narrative which Chessman sees as authoritarian (matriarchal/patriarchal) towards what Chessman calls a poetics of dialogue, which takes the relations between lovers as a paradigm for relations between self/other, narrator/reader, author/audience. This model is based on collusion and conversation, on dialogue rather than monologue, and is used to explain not only Stein's stylistic development, but also the new relationship Stein establishes with the reader."

"Despite the valuable contributions of feminist criticism and the general ideas presented here, Chessman's overdetermination of some of the passages in Stein is unsettling."

Ellen E. Berry in Contemporary Literature: "Harriet Scott Chessman's The Public Is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein takes a major step outside the dialectic within which Stein criticism has remained lodged, according to Benstock. It adds significantly to the contemporary effort to "rediscover" Stein pre- cisely because it problematizes the critical methods used to approach her complex deconstructive/reconstructive project. Through subtle, illuminating readings of both well-known and little-known Stein texts, Chessman elaborates a poetics of dialogue within Stein's work that becomes "a central paradigm for [her] Modernist and feminist project" (2)."

Michael J. Hoffman in Modern Fiction Studies: "Aside from Bakhtin, whom Chessman reads through Kristeva, the major theorists behind the study include Lacan, feminist Lacanians such as Irigaray and Cixous, and others of the écriture feminine school. Chessman claims that Stein "shares with these writers numerous literary strategies: the disruption of conventional grammar, plot, genre, and modes of representation, together with the exploration of plural voices and of a writing attached to the body."

"Overall, this book contains a stimulating although occasionally obligatory use of poststructuralist techniques to discuss a writer whose work increasingly seems to reward that kind of reading. Chessman absorbs the work of similar critics, and for the most part she advances beyond them."