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    Narration: Four Lectures
    Narration: Four Lectures
    Narration: Four Lectures
    Ebook76 pages1 hour

    Narration: Four Lectures

    By Gertrude Stein, Thornton Wilder and Liesl M. Olson

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    Newly famous in the wake of the publication of her groundbreaking Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein delivered her Narration lectures to packed audiences at the University of Chicago in 1935. Stein had not been back to her home country since departing for France in 1903, and her remarks reflect on the changes in American culture after thirty years abroad.

    In Stein’s trademark experimental prose, Narration reveals the legendary writer’s thoughts about the energy and mobility of the American people, the effect of modernism on literary form, the nature of history and its recording, and the inventiveness of the English language—in particular, its American variant. Stein also discusses her ambivalence toward her own literary fame as well as the destabilizing effect that notoriety had on her daily life. Restored to print for a new generation of readers to discover, these vital lectures will delight students and scholars of modernism and twentieth-century literature.

    “Narration is a treasure waiting to be rediscovered and to be pirated by jolly marauders of sparkling texts.”—Catharine Stimpson, NYU

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateMay 15, 2010
    ISBN9780226771557
    Narration: Four Lectures
    Author

    Gertrude Stein

    Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an American novelist and poet. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Stein was raised in an upper-middle-class Jewish family alongside four siblings. After a brief move to Vienna and Paris, the Steins settled in Oakland, California in 1878, where Stein would spend her formative years. In 1892, following the loss of her mother and father, Stein moved with her sister to live with family in Baltimore, where she was exposed to salon culture. From 1893 to 1897 she attended Radcliffe College, studying psychology under William James. Conducting experiments on the phenomenon of normal motor automatism, Stein produced early examples of steam of consciousness or automatic writing, a hallmark of the Modernist style later practiced by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and William Faulkner. In 1897, she enrolled at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine on the recommendation of James, but ultimately left before completing her degree. She moved to Paris with her brother Leo, an artist, in 1903. In the French capital, the Steins gained a reputation as art collectors, purchasing works by Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Renoir. At 27 rue de Fleurus, Stein hosted an influential salon for such artists and intellectuals as Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who recognized her as a leading Modernist and central figure of the so-called Lost Generation. Her influential works include Three Lives (1909), Tender Buttons (1912), and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), all of which exemplify her control over vastly different styles of poetry and prose. Capable of producing experimental, hermetic works that draw attention to the constructed nature of language, Stein also excelled with straightforward narratives, essays, and biographical descriptions. From 1907 until her death, Stein and her life partner Alice B. Toklas gained a reputation as leaders in the international avant-garde, and remain essential to our understanding of the development of twentieth century art and culture.

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    • 4/5
      Once you get past the silliness of American exceptionalism (in short: the English just like being, whereas Americans like doing shit and shit), there are some decent points made here, and Stein's attention to actual words, rather than character/plot/psychology/structure is a nice corrective to most discussion about narrative. I'll continue to think about her distinction between poetry and prose, in particular: poetry as continual naming, prose as a kind of reflection on mediation ("prose was more and more telling and by sentences balancing and then by paragraphing prose was more and more telling how anything happened if any one had anything to say about what happened how anything was known if anyone had anything to say about how anything was known..."). Since 'literature' is predominantly subjective, our problem is to make what is 'outside' 'inside,' that is, to make the objective world subjectively interesting.

      Fair enough. Stein's arguments here are in some ways typically modernist, and in other ways more interesting than academics usually make modernism seem. But the real draw is Stein's style; the quote above is entirely representative. She doesn't use many words, but the ones she does use are very common, and the ones she does use she sure does use a lot. Not too many people could get away with that.

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