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Whose Gertrude Stein? Contemporary Poetry, Modernist Institutions and Stein’S Troublesome Legacy

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Whose Gertrude Stein? Contemporary Poetry, Modernist Institutions and Stein’S Troublesome Legacy Whose Gertrude Stein? Contemporary Poetry, Modernist Institutions and Stein’s Troublesome Legacy Isabelle Lucy Parkinson Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Statement of Originality I, Isabelle Lucy Parkinson, confirm that the research included within this thesis is my own work or that where it has been carried out in collaboration with, or supported by others, that this is duly acknowledged below and my contribution indicated. Previously published material is also acknowledged below. I attest that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge break any UK law, infringe any third party’s copyright or other Intellectual Property Right, or contain any confidential material. I accept that the College has the right to use plagiarism detection software to check the electronic version of the thesis. I confirm that this thesis has not been previously submitted for the award of a degree by this or any other university. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. Signature: I. Parkinson Date: 30/09/16 Details of collaboration and publications: Material from Chapter 2 published as ‘Modernist Group Identities and Gertrude Stein’s “portraits” of Matisse and Picasso’ in Ecloga: Journal of Literature and the Arts New Work in Modernist Studies Special Edition (2014), 109-129. Data visualisations in Chapter 5 produced in collaboration with Amy Macdougall, PhD student, Medical Statistics: National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College University of London. 1 Abstract 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. 1 Pierre Bourdieu ‘The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed’, in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), pp.29-73 (p.30). 2 Contents List of illustrations Page 4 Introduction Page 5 Chapter 1 The Real Gertrude Stein Page 26 Chapter 2 Modernist Persona Page 64 Chapter 3 Stein in the Academy Page 98 Chapter 4 Stein and the Death of Modernism Page 136 Chapter 5 Gertrude Stein: Conceptual Writer Page 179 Afterword Page 231 Bibliography Page 239 3 List of illustrations Figure 1 Bourdieu’s model of the French literary field Page 21 Figure 2 Bonnie Kime Scott, ‘A Tangled Mesh of Modernists’ Page 199 Figure 3 Tanya E Clement, ‘Repetition plotted on 3D scatter plot’ Page 200 Figure 4 References to and from authors in Against Expression: An Page 203 Anthology of Conceptual Writing Figure 5 Twenty-first century positions on the field. Page 206 Figure 6 Darwin’s branching diagram of phylogeny Page 207 Figure 7 Authors referred to most frequently in Against Page 224 Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing Figure 8 The network of names in Against Expression: An Page 225 Anthology of Conceptual Writing 4 Introduction An avant-garde genealogy Since her recuperation by the Language poets in the late 1970s, and in the literary histories proposed by Charles Bernstein, Peter Quartermain, Marjorie Perloff and others, Gertrude Stein has been situated as the early-twentieth-century originator of an avant-garde genealogy.2 This genealogy is identified as the alternative to the ‘institutionalised’ modernism which culminated in the canon endorsed by the New Critics. The argument for her status as an avant-garde anomaly continues to the present day in claims by Kenneth Goldsmith, Craig Dworkin and associated writers and scholars that Stein is a precursor for conceptual writing, a contemporary ‘tendency’ in poetry which is explicitly characterised as the twenty-first century inheritor of the avant-garde.3 The claim for Stein’s place in the genealogies these scholars and poets write is predicated on a distinction between her work and the cultural production associated with the ‘institution’ of modernism, and it hinges on the view that her writing stands apart from canonical modernism and its legacy. Because of their basis in Stein’s distinctiveness, none of these arguments discuss in any detail the relationship of her literary practice to its immediate cultural context, often explicitly detaching the work from the historical moment in which it was produced and reading it as a sealed and self-reflexive entity. In reading Stein’s oeuvre as divorced from the history of literary modernism, these arguments find an escape 2 See Charles Bernstein, Contents Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1986); Peter Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Marjorie Perloff, Twenty-First Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002). All of these texts are discussed in detail in Chapter 1. See also Juliana Spahr and Joan Retallack, discussed later in the introduction. For other references, see Chapter 1. Stein is also often cited in introductions to collections of ‘innovative’ poetry through the 1980s and 90s. See, for example, In The American Tree: Language, Poetry, Realism, ed. by Ron Siliman (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1986), Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK, ed. by Maggie O’Sullivan (London: Reality Street Editions, 1996) and Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, ed. by Mary Sloan (Jersey City: Talisman Publishers, 1998). 3Craig Dworkin, ‘The Fate of Echo’, in Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, ed. by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), p.xliv. For Stein as a precursor to conceptual writing beyond her discussion in Dworkin and Goldsmith’s anthology and in their other works and texts, see also Marjorie Perloff, Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman, as discussed in Chapter 5. This genealogy is also traced in Paul Stephens’s 2015 study, which puts Stein and conceptual writing at either end of a lineage defined as avant-garde. In Stephens’s argument, the avant-garde is defined as a particular kind of response to developments in technology. See Paul Stephens, The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 5 route out of the sanctioned form of modernism which was bound to the cultural hegemony of its own time and assimilated as doctrine into the New Critical academy. An alternative literary history can spring from Stein’s corpus, both because it was always a disturbing presence in modernism, even in its early-twentieth-century phase, and because it has not been absorbed into the literary history written by the New Critics in the post-war period. The contention of this thesis is that Stein’s work is not a peculiar practice distinct from the bulk of modernist cultural production: that, on the contrary, her texts make their meaning in specific engagements with the context from which the arguments for her avant-garde difference presume they stand aloof. In my reading, her texts are a series of conscious and explicit interventions on the cultural field, and this is an argument which inevitably troubles the histories which set her work purely in resistance to the cultural landscape of her period. In returning the texts to their milieu, I engage directly with those histories, thinking through Stein’s work in its relation to ‘modernism’ and probing the subsequent writing of its history as ‘avant-garde’ as opposed to ‘modernist’. I will be examining her particular and shifting relations to her cultural context, mapping both the positions she takes and the positions she is assigned by her contemporaries in the network Pierre Bourdieu theorises as the ‘space of literary or artistic position-takings’.4
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