>Just random words repeated forever forever forever >Meaning moved ways not understood >Gets treated as the greatest writer ever purely because she was pretentious AND GAY.
>>23973262Before some faggot calls me an Indian, it's satirizing her schizophrenic use of syntax, which masquerades as something deep, creative and crafty.
>>23973262Her being treated as a writer way above her real grade has more to do with her jewishness than with her being gay and pretentious.
>>23973262 She played an important role in the development of modernism, but she played it for men. And she is just not readable. She became viewed as a "sister": That doesn't sanctify her work. We can criticize it.
>>23973262Reading Hemingway call her a kike in his letters to Ezra Pound was pretty funny.
>>23973262>Gets treated as the greatest writerwhere? nobody even reads her
>>23973967William Gass thought she was the best writer of all time. I get that no one reads anymore--expect some zoomers who read booktok recs--but serious readers know about her.
>>23974870There's a certain kind of reader who deliberately seeks out the "minor classics", so to speak, of any era they like, and then make a really ostentatious show of their liking of those works and authors as a sort of literary hipsterism. Surely you've seen the type.It only goes so far, though. There's a reason why Stein is a hipster pick but Wyndham Lewis isn't.
>>23974914I'm aware of this tendency, I'm still puzzled by the readers inability to distinguish though. She isn't in a plausibly deniable position like DFW, she's transparently bad.>"minor classics"I contest this. She is worthy of ridicule only. I hope someone let her know where she stood.
>>23974914Readers’ tastes differ. Nothing wrong with liking some minor classics over major works or bonafide classics. Only time it is weird is when someone says they must obscooor and they dislike all major classics. It reeks of I’m not like the other girls
>>23973262Gertrude Stein recently returned to America after an absence of many years. In Paris, where she lived as a forbidding priestess of a strange literary cult, Gertrude Stein accumulated a salon frequented by some of the outstanding names of the modern art world and acquired the reputation of a literary freak. People either gaped at her published writings, or laughed at her incomprehensible literary epigrams- "a rose is a rose is a rose ."She was looked upon by those who believed in her as the greatest revolutionist in the history of contemporary literature, and by those who scoffed as the perpetrator of a gigantic literary hoax.As it happens, neither of the two opinions is wholly correct. Her "revolution" resembles a literary putsch, and if her writing is "a hoax" nevertheless she earnestly believes in it.
In essence, what Gertrude Stein's work represents is an example of the most extreme subjectivism of the contemporary bourgeois artist, and a reflection of the ideological anarchy into which the whole of bourgeois literature has fallen.What was it that Gertrude Stein set out to do with literature? When one reads her work it appears to resemble the monotonous gibberings of paranoiacs in the private wards of asylums. It appears to be a deliberate irrationality, a deliberate infantilism. However, the woman's not insane, but possessed of a strong, clear, shrewd mind. She was an excellent medical student, a brilliant psychologist, and in her more "popular" writings one sees evidence of wit and some wisdom.And yet her works read like the literature of the students of padded cells in Matteawan.Example: "I see the moon and the moon sees me. God bless the moon and God bless me and this you see remember me. In this way one fifth of the bananas were bought."The above is supposed to be a description of how Gertrude Stein feels when she sees Matisse, the French modernist painter. It doesn't make sense. But this is precisely what it is supposed to do- not "make sense" in the normal meaning of the term... The generation of artists of which Gertrude Stein is the most erratic figure arduously set out not to "make sense" in their literature. They believed that the instincts of man were superior to the reasonings of the rational mind. They believed in intuition as a higher form of learning and knowledge. Therefore, many of them wrote only about what they dreamed, dream literature. Others practised a kind of "automatic writing" where they would sit for hours scribbling the random, subconscious itchings of their souls. They abandoned themselves to the mystic irrationalities of their spirits in order to create works of art which would be expressions of the timeless soul of man, etc. The result unfortunately revealed their souls as astonishingly childish or imbecile.The literary insanity of Gertrude Stein is a deliberate insanity which arises out of a false conception of the nature of art and of the function of language.A leisure class, which exists on the labor of others, which has no function to perform in society except the clipping of investment coupons, develops ills and neuroses. It suffers perpetually from boredom. Their life is stale to them. Tasteless, inane, because it has no meaning. They seek new sensations, new adventures constantly in order to give themselves feelings.The same process took place with the artists of the leisure class. Literature also bored them. They tried to suck out of it new sensations, new adventures.They destroyed the common use of language. Normal ways of using words bored them. They wished to use words in a new, sensational fashion. They twisted grammar, syntax. They went in for primitive emotions, primitive art. Blood, violent death, dope dreams, soul-writhings, became the themes of their works.
In Gertrude Stein, art became a personal pleasure, a private hobby, a vice. She did not care to communicate because essentially there was nothing to communicate. She had no responsibility except to her own inordinate cravings. She became the priestess of a cult with strange literary rites, with mystical secrets.In this light, one can see that to Gertrude Stein and to the other artists like her, art exists in the vacuum of a private income. In order to pursue the kind of art, in order to be the kind of artist Gertrude Stein is, it is necessary to live in that kind of society which will permit one to have a private income from wealthy parents or sound investments. With this as a basis, you can write as you please. You can destroy language, mutilate grammar, rave or rant in the name of the higher knowledge. Nobody will disturb you. And in time perhaps you can impress or intimidate a certain number of critics and win a kind of reputation.Gertrude Stein has won the reputation. She returns home to America after an absence of thirty-one years to find herself an object of curious respect by book clubs and lecture societies, and front page news for the newspapers.Which seems to me to be proof that with enough money and enough persistence a madman can convince a world of his sanity. Gertrude Stein appears to have convinced America that she is a genius.But Marxists refuse to be impressed with her own opinion of herself. They see in the work of Gertrude Stein extreme symptoms of the decay of capitalist culture. They view her work as the complete attempt to annihilate all relations between the artist and the society in which he lives.They see in her work the same kind of orgy and spiritual abandon that marks the life of the whole leisure class.What else does her work resemble more than the midnight revels of a stockbroker throwing a pent-house party for a few intimate friends? Would it be possible to have either of these symptoms of degeneration except in a society divided into classes? Is there not an "idle art" just as there is an "idle rich"? Both do nothing but cultivate the insanity of their own desires, both cultivate strange indulgences. The literary idiocy of Gertrude Stein only reflects the madness of the whole system of capitalist values. It is part of the signs of doom that are written largely everywhere on the walls of bourgeois society.
>>23974870>know about herknow about is not the same as reading, anon. she's a footnote
>>23975197Tender Buttons is supposedly important. I found it boring thoughsobeit.
>>23974870Just realized noticed I wrote expect not except. Good god such a silly, dyslexic mistake.
>>23975275>supposedlycome on now
She is not treated as a modernist great or anything like that, but Making of Americans is a great book. That one is not non-sense and perhaps the only the her aesthetic and theory worked together well in tandem.
>>23975168>>23975175>>23975178Wow, citing a 1930 Marxist hit piece (without attributing or dating it) to appreciate the legacy or rather the writing qualities of Stein.
>>23973262I've only read 3 Lives and some poems, but that alone was enough to convince me of her extraordinary talent. I think it takes a shallow mind, if not the vain jealously of an ambitious youth, to not recognize that she enriched literature and the toolbox of writers. I may admit that her genius is not very easy to grasp.
>>23975013her style is more distinctive than dfw
>>23974914>There's a reason why Stein is a hipster pick but Wyndham Lewis isn't.What is that reason? I see value in both, but they are really not comparable, are they?
>>23976939Lewis was kind of a bad boy until the late 1930s.
>>23976708Why not articulate yourself? You just jerked off and jaculated some baseless assertions
>>23976772>DistinctiveSure, like shit is distinctive from bread. When speaking of talent alone, DFW has his storytelling and malaise to hide behind--Stein is just a brazen pseud.
>>23977109>>23977114You are an insufferable asshole. Too bad that's all you are.
>>23977176Triggered little nigger
>>23973262kinda related, but i picked up a first (american) edition of the making of americans for 40 bucks, only to discover a few months after the fact that it was signed. no idea what it's worth, but pretty cool.
>>23978544That might be worth up to a thousand dollar, depending on the condition of the book.
As much as I don't really like the book, I found that the opening section to "the making of americans" was quite well done. She's in a weird spot for me, she had some latent talent, but what she was aiming for was too obscure and solopsistic to be worth going through, still-these opening lines have always intrigued me"Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.”It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away." --the making of americans
>>23976345Marxists claim that idealism is a cover for class war, but this is personal vitriol pretending to be class war.
>>23973491There was a time when I, like most middle class liberal suburbanites, considered "anti-semitism" a knock against someone's character. Now I see it for what it is: good judgment. As a result, pound has moved from my skip list to my backlog.
so what's the difference btn her insanity and that of joyce?
>>23974870>20th ce literal who novelist sucks off another literal who if they havent been dead for 400 years, dont care.
In the foreword to Library of America's edition of L*ncoln's speeches Gore Vidal writes that Gertrude Stein believed the war criminal Ulysses Gr*nt to have been the greates stylist in the American variety of English. That alone makes all her opinions on literature null and void
>>23981117Joyce's books sound good.
