Gertrude Stein And The Making Of Jewish Modernism

Challenging the assumption that modernist writer Gertrude Stein seldom integrated her Jewish identity and heritage into her work, this book uncovers Stein’s constant and varied writing about Jewish topics throughout her career. Amy Feinstein argues that Judaism was central to Stein’s ideas about modernity, showing how Stein connects the modernist era to the Jewish experience.  Combing through Stein’s scholastic writings, drafting notebooks, and literary works, Feinstein analyzes references to Judaism that have puzzled scholars. She reveals the never-before-discussed influence of Matthew Arnold as well as a hidden Jewish framework in Stein’s epic novel The Making of Americans. In Stein’s experimental “voices” poems, Feinstein identifies an explicitly Jewish vocabulary that expresses themes of marriage, nationalism, and Zionism. She also shows how Wars I Have Seen, written in Vichy France during World War II, compares the experience of wartime occupation with the historic persecution of Jews.  Affirming the importance of Jewish identity and modernist style to Gertrude Stein’s legacy as a writer, this book radically changes the way we read and appreciate Stein’s work.

Drawing on a variety of interdisciplinary debates in cultural studies and contemporary theory, Modernism, Inc. provides a new look at the relationship between modernism and postmodernism within the critical frame of twentieth-century American culture. Organized around the idea of "incorporation"--embodiment, repressed memory, and advanced capitalism--Modernism, Inc. covers a wide range of topics: Josephine Baker's "hot house style"; the president's penis in American political life; myth-making and the Hoover Dam; trauma, poetics, and the Armenian genocide; feminist kitsch and the recuperation of North America's "Great Lady painters"; Gertrude Stein and Jewish Social Science; the Reno Divorce Factory and the production of gender; Andy Razaf and Black Bolshevism. Collectively, the essays suggest that the relationship between the modern and the postmodern is not one of rupture, belatedness, dilution, or extremity, but of haunting. Modernism, Inc. looks at our ghosts, and at the unspeakable secrets of modernity from which they're derived. Contributors: Maria Damon, Walter Kalidjian, Walter Lew, Janet Lyon, William J. Maxwell, Cary Nelson, John Timberman Newcombe, David G. Nicholls, Thomas Pepper, Paula Rabinowitz, Daniel Rosenberg, Marlon Ross, Jani Scandura, Kathleen Stewart, Julia Walker.

Published in 1925, Gertrude Stein's "The Making of Americans" is a groundbreaking exploration of identity, family, and the American experience. The novel spans generations, delving into the lives of two families as they navigate the complexities of self-discovery and societal expectations. Stein employs her distinctive, experimental prose style, challenging traditional narrative structures. Through a meticulous examination of characters and their evolving relationships, Stein crafts a profound meditation on the intricate process of shaping individual and collective identities. "The Making of Americans" stands as a seminal work in modernist literature, pushing boundaries and redefining the possibilities of narrative form.

A collection of writings by Gertrude Stein written between 1932 and her death in 1946.

What is between us and the Christians is a deep dark affair which will go for another hundred generations . . .” (Amos Oz, Judas) Among the great social shifts of the post–World War II era is the unlikely sea-change in Jewish Christian relations. We read each other’s scriptures and openly discuss differences as well as similarities. Yet many such encounters have become rote and predictable. Powerful emotions stirred up by these conversations are often dismissed or ignored. Demonstrating how such emotions as shame, envy, and desire can inform these encounters, Holy Envy: Writing in the Jewish Christian Borderzone charts a new way of thinking about interreligious relations. Moreover, by focusing on modern and contemporary writers (novelists and poets) who traffic in the volatile space between Judaism and Christianity, the book calls attention to the creative implications of these intense encounters. While recognizing a long-overdue need to address a fundamentally Christian narrative underwriting twentieth century American verse, Holy Envy does more than represent Christianity as an aesthetically coercive force, or as an adversarial other. For the book also suggests how literature can excavate an alternative interreligious space, at once risky and generative. In bringing together recent accounts of Jewish Christian relations, affect theory, and poetics, Holy Envy offers new ways into difficult and urgent, conversations about interreligious encounters. Holy Envy is sure to engage readers who are interested in literature, religion, and, above all, interfaith dialogue.

Gertrude Stein frequently called herself a genius, but what did this term really mean for her? Stein's claims to genius are legendary, appearing frequently throughout her texts and public lectures. Were they the signs of excessive egotism, of desperate self-advertisement, or of something else entirely? This book examines the centrality and the specificity of the idea of 'genius' to Stein's work and to the aesthetic ideals and contradictory intellectual affiliations of high modernism in general. Through a chronological reading, it maps Stein's move from an early investment in an essential and essentializing notion of 'genius' to her later use of the term to describe an anti-essentialist, democratic textual process. It considers how this revisionary idea of 'genius' came to correspond with Stein's identification of herself as Jewish, queer and American. And it ends with Stein's seemingly paradoxical decision to call a text about being a genius in America, Everybody's Autobiography. Drawing upon a wide range of literary theory, cultural criticism and historical evidence, and offering new readings of previously unexamined texts by Stein, Barbara Will challenges received understandings of Stein's claims to 'genius' and of modernist literary hermeticism by reconceptualising the textual practice of this exemplary modernist writer.Key Features:*A scholarly study of a writer who is receiving ever-increasing critical attention*The first major scholarly study to deal with Gertrude Stein's central claim to being a genius*Offers new insight into debates over modernism, mass culture, and postmodernism*Combines a historical approach with a theoretical reading inflected by postmodern thinking*Original, theoretically informed and consistently well-writtenGertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of 'Genius' was winner of the Choice Outstanding Academic Title award in 2001.

The Making of Americans is a modernist novel that traces the genealogy, history, and psychological development of members of the fictional Hersland and Dehning families. Being ostensibly a history of three generations of and everyone they knew or knew them, the novel is a philosophical and poetic meditation on identity, on what it means to be human living an everyday, mundane life. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright and art collector, best known for Three Lives, The Making of Americans and Tender Buttons. Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. Picasso and Cubism were an important influence on Stein's writing. Her works are compared to James Joyce's Ulysses and to Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

This collection of essays is the first to address this often obscured dimension of modern and contemporary poetry: the secular Jewish dimension. Editors Daniel Morris and Stephen Paul Miller asked their contributors to address what constitutes radical poetry written by Jews defined as "secular," and whether or not there is a Jewish component or dimension to radical and modernist poetic practice in general. These poets and critics address these questions by exploring the legacy of those poets who preceded and influenced them--Stein, Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen, and Ginsberg, among others.