Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

Gertrude Stein

- She studied at Radcliffe College with William James T the relation mind-object never static, part of a developing flux, conclusions never fixed, constantly under pragmatic test. Consciousness best seen as a Heraclitean river or stream - with this he substantiated one of the fundamental modernist epistemological metaphors.

- Steins initial training was in experimental psychology and medicine. She took interest in automatic writing, the rhythmic tropes of memory. She moved to Paris (1903) to continue experiments in the form  of imaginative writing. She moved toward a form of tropic (moving) repetition and against : - the realistic noun

- chronological ordering of narrative

- chronological remembering

- She sought to displace conventional narrative past tense with a continuous present and she tried to approach the spatial form : collage like constructs functioning by word associations and rejecting realistic or naturalistic notation. Her aim : to turn temporal/historical perspectives into spatial structures.

- She had also a sacramental view of human creativity : words can vibrate. From 1910 on she tried to dissociate words from conventional context and stale association, to display them in their being, to render them through inspired perception. E.g. Tender Buttons (1914) [poetry without conventional logic or grammar, intended to express the qualities of objects]-a conscious attempt to seize the uniqueness of certain fleeting intuitions; the new word is supposed to express a new and purified perception of common reality. This was part of the inward journey into the self tried by the early 20th century artists. The creative act had to be a union of the technical and the spiritual in one act, an expression of a unified self.

- the final purpose of art, according to Stein, was, by the exercise of a special gift or craft to bring the medium as close as possible to the artists peceptions, a pursuit of the thing itself, to render the elusive quality of existence