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.

Since its publication in 1914, readings of Tender Buttons have often found their interpretive anchor in the person of Gertrude Stein. Due in part to Stein’s enigmatic aura and self-created status as celebrity and genius, readings of the poem often conflate Stein with her work, using elements of her life to explain the inexplicable. My project examines this tendency by constructing a condensed critical history that focuses on the earliest responses to the work as well as recent and contemporary criticism. I question the efficacy of these readings, and in hopes of developing new approaches, I end my project by examining Stein’s own writings about writing and interacting with Tender Buttons. By suggesting new strategies and evaluating previous strategies, my project aims to encourage new ways of reading Tender Buttons that are less dependent on its authorial aura and can perhaps even lead to a more approachable, pleasurable reading experience.

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.

Gertrude Stein (Allegheny, Pennsylvanie, 1874 – Paris, 1946), figure centrale du modernisme américain, est souvent saluée pour avoir porté très loin une expérience linguistique et grammaticale, au sein d’une œuvre très vaste explorant tous les genres – romans, nouvelles, poèmes longs et courts, essais et conférences, pièces de théâtre, livrets d’opéra, biographies et autobiographies. L’objet de ce travail est d’analyser le rapport que la langue de Gertrude Stein entretient avec le réalisme : comme tradition littéraire d’abord, en réinvestissant l’héritage naturaliste et en l’américanisant par le remplacement de Claude Bernard par William James comme figure tutélaire de la méthode expérimentale ; comme déplacement du réel dans la langue elle-même qui échoue toujours à se réifier tout à fait ; comme injonction à la véracité enfin, dans des fictions plus tardives qui mettent en scène leur propre mauvaise foi et font de l’Amérique le territoire idéal et idéel de l’iréel. Parallèlement, nous tentons de mettre au jour la dynamique des genres qui se joue dans cette conversation renouvelée avec le réalisme, où chaque déplacement au sein d’une poétique mouvante devient une nouvelle façon de mettre la langue à l’épreuve du monde et de sa capacité à le viser. À partir de deux œuvres du début de sa carrière (les trois nouvelles de Three Lives et le long roman The Making of Americans), de sa poésie dite descriptive (les « portraits »), des Stanzas in Meditation et de deux œuvres en prose plus tardives (Four in America et Ida a Novel) nous essayons de comprendre la façon dont Stein envisageait les partitions génériques, notamment entre prose et poésie, et le rôle qu’elle leur donnait dans son parcours artistique et esthétique. / Gertrude Stein (Allegheny, Pennsylvania, 1874 – Paris, 1946) is a central figure of American modernism. She is celebrated for the radical experiments with language and grammar she conducted throughout a literary career in which she tried her hand at all genres: novels, novellas, long and short poems, essays, conferences, plays, opera librettos, biographies and autobiographies. The present dissertation analyzes the connections of Stein’s language to realism. The notion will be understood, first, as a literary tradition, which Stein reinterprets by americanizing it (through the replacement of Claude Bernard by William James as her mentor in the experimental method); second, as a displacement of the “real” within language itself, despite its consistent failure to become just a thing among others; third, as a call to veracity, in later works of fiction which stage their own disingenuousness and make America the ideal territory of the unreal. It will be argued that this constantly evolving conversation between Stein’s work and realism also implies a renewal of generic issues: each shift within an unstable generic system is a new way to test the ability of language to account for the world. Focusing on two early works (the three novellas of Three Lives and the long novel The Making of Americans), pieces of “descriptive” poetry (the “portraits”), the Stanzas in Meditation and two later prose works (Four in America) and (Ida a Novel), this dissertation will try to show how Stein understood generic boundaries, including that between poetry and prose, and what part they played in her aesthetic development.

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;

This thesis analyzes Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons through the framework of the cult of domesticity. In understanding the ways in which Stein mocks and transgresses gender constrictions, while simultaneously adopting the language of domesticity, I understand the ways in which Stein breaks with the antebellum notion of separate spheres.

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.