Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2000. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 296-308). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Diss. : Universität Duisburg-Essen, Allemagne : 2003. / Bibliogr. p. 129-142.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1981. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 288-300).

This thesis is an examination of the ways in which, in what Bourdieu theorises as the 'space of literary or artistic position-takings', Gertrude Stein has been continually positioned and repositioned, constructed and reconstructed: by writers in her own period, in modernism scholarship, and, particularly, by writers staking their claim as the literary avant-garde of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.1 Since her recuperation by the Language Poets in the 1970s, and in the literary histories proposed by Marjorie Perloff and others, Stein has been positioned as the originator of an alternative avant-garde genealogy which has resisted the 'institutionalised' modernism of the New Critics. This legacy continues to the present day in claims by writers like Kenneth Goldsmith that she is a precursor for Conceptual Writing. Because they are predicated on Stein's resistance to the institution of modernism, and hinge on her removal from its history, none of these arguments discuss in any detail Stein's relationship to the historical movement which is the immediate context for her work - to the institution of modernism itself or to the institutions with which it engages. My thesis challenges the removal of Stein from her milieu by showing how her textual production must be read alongside her activity on her contemporary scene and her representation of and by other modernists. In the thesis, I re-read Stein's work as a series of explicit interventions in the institutions which form the context of the cultural production of the early 20th Century. In doing so, I consider the motivations for the reconstructions and repositionings of Stein, tracing the historiography of her presentation as an exceptional figure dislocated from her context.

Diss.--Fachbereich Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft--Mainz--Johannnes Gutenberg-Universität, 1991.

[pt] Esta pesquisa constrói um diálogo entre os retratos de invenção performados pela escritora Gertrude Stein e pela cineasta Agnès Varda. Estes atos de escrita são criações paradoxais, experimentos de linguagem que montam e desmontam as figuras evocadas. As estratégias de composição empregadas pelas duas autoras foram analisadas a partir dos conceitos de gesto, na visão de Vilém Flusser; e das noções de desconstrução e de contra-assinatura, como entendidas por Jacques Derrida. O estudo traça um paralelo entre suas retratísticas - consideradas aqui como ensaios performáticos (performances ensaísticas?) - por meio da insistência de gestos e de formas performativas do fluxo da consciência, que colocam em xeque ideias dualistas como eu-outro; dentrofora; e razão-percepção. São atos de escrita que fazem das figuras retratadas um atravessamento de sons, imagens e palavras. Nestes experimentos de linguagem, as realizadoras abraçam o paradoxo, tendo como foco não a forma, mas o movimento que desfaz a forma, para reconstruí-la de novo e de novo, fazendo de suas escritas corpos errantes que se (des)constroem no trânsito entre a estética e a política. / [en] This research builds a dialogue between the portraits of invention performed by the writer Gertrude Stein and the filmmaker Agnès Varda. These acts of writing are paradoxical creations, language experiments that assemble and disassemble the evoked figures. The composition strategies employed by the two authors were analyzed from the concepts of gesture, in the view of Vilém Flusser; and the notionsof deconstruction and counter-signature, as understood by Jacques Derrida. The study draws a parallel between their portraiture - considered here as performative essays (essayistic performances?) - through the insistence of gestures and performative forms of the flow of consciousness, which put in check dualistic ideas such as I-other; inside-outside; and reason-perception. They are acts of writing that make the portrayed figures a crossing of sounds, images and words. In these language experiments, the filmmakers embrace paradox, focusing not on form, buton the movement that undoes form, to reconstruct it again and again, making theirwritings wandering bodies that are (de)constructed in the transit between aesthetics and politics.

This study explores the fruitful interchanges between modernist literary technique, the culture of modernity, and children's literature. While some recent scholarship has examined works that modernist authors like Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, and Cummings produced for child readers, modernist children's literature remains a largely neglected field. Examining texts by A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner), Gertrude Stein (The World is Round), and J.M. Barrie (Peter and Wendy) through the lens of literary modernism, this project explicates how these authors adapt modernist techniques, ideologies, and preoccupations in their writing for children. Focusing on themes of alienation, disillusionment, memory, imagination, gender construction, child development, and the disruption of Arcadian myths, I argue that these texts adopt modernist techniques to explore, uphold, or challenge modernity's construction of the child. Embracing modernist indeterminacy and ambiguity, these texts directly engage with constructions of childhood as a mode of modernist experimentation. Recontextualizing these children's works in the context of literary modernism reveals how the two genres are symbiotically related, thereby broadening our understanding of literary culture and discourses of childhood in the early twentieth century. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts; / English / PhD; / Dissertation;

Drawing on criminological history, visual studies, modernist scholarship, sociological treatises, and theories of archives and collection, this study proposes that literary texts of the early twentieth century approached the problem of knowing and representing others through collections. Inspired by the supposed divide between the city and the small town, modernist writers depict—but also resist—a vision of the group and the individual as inscrutable. The criminological apparatus of the turn of the century attends to both urban and provincial modes of existence, promising the small circles, close study of individuals, and knowability of the small town while also acceding to the urban vision of people in vast unknowable quantities and a perpetual psychic distance from others. Criminology was positioned, and positioned itself, as decidedly modern in its data-driven approach to managing the presumed unknowability of the individual and the group. The texts in this study continually grapple with accessing individual identity amidst the masses of modern humanity, and articulate this struggle through representation of small groups, circles, and coteries. It is through the enclosed set of people that Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, and Carl Van Vechten demonstrate a fixation on both the individual and the group, and the relationship between the two. Their literary output and personal associations—which center on observation, portraiture, and collection—are fundamentally criminological in their efforts to negotiate the distance and intimacy of modern life.

Thesis (M.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2008. / Document formatted into pages; contains v, 93 p. Includes bibliographical references.

Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-233). Also available online in ProQuest, free to University of Oregon users.