Approaches to Teaching the Works of Gertrude Stein
- Editors: Logan Esdale, Deborah M. Mix
- Pages: 258
- Published: 2018
- ISBN: 9781603293440 (Paperback)
- ISBN: 9781603293433 (Hardcover)
“No account of American literature, literary modernism, and women’s literature would be complete without attention to Gertrude Stein. . . . This collection of essays suggests contexts in which we can teach her work.”
—Jane Bowers, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York
A trailblazing modernist, Gertrude Stein studied psychology at Radcliffe with William James and went on to train as a medical doctor before coming out as a lesbian and moving to Paris, where she collected contemporary art and wrote poetry, novels, and libretti. Known as a writer’s writer, she has influenced every generation of American writers since her death in 1946 and remains avant-garde.
Part 1 of this volume, “Materials,” provides information and resources that will help teachers and students begin and pursue their study of Stein. The essays of part 2, “Approaches,” introduce major topics to be covered in the classroom—race, gender, feminism, sexuality, narrative form, identity, and Stein’s experimentation with genre—in a wide range of contexts, including literary analysis, art history, first-year composition, and cultural studies.
Meg Albrinck
Corinne E. Blackmer
Laurel Bollinger
Michelle J. Brazier
Jody Cardinal
Leonard Diepeveen
J. Ashley Foster
Adam Frank
Roger Gilbert
Jonathan Goldberg
Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick
Wenwen Guo
Elisabeth Hedrick-Moser
Susannah Hollister
Stacy Carson Hubbard
Erica J. Kaufman
Sharon J. Kirsch
Kimberly Lamm
Jane Malcolm
E. L. McCallum
Michael Moon
Laura Mullen
James Peck
Lee Rumbarger
Patricia A. Schechter
Emily Setina
Loretta Stec
Linda Voris
Rebecca Walsh
Acknowledgments (ix)
PART ONE: MATERIALS
Family Life and Education (3)
Transatlantic Stein (4)
Alice Toklas (9)
Yale Archive (12)
Publication History (14)
Critical Reception (18)
Influence (20)
PART TWO: APPROACHES
Introduction (31)
Narrative Prose (40)
Teaching Q. E. D. (40)
Teaching Race, Gender, and Narrative Form in “Melanctha” (47)
Americans Aloud (53)
Teaching Comparative Stylistics: Gendered Language in Stein and Hemingway (60)
Cultivating a Critical Edge: Teaching The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in the College Writing Classroom (67)
“The Picture Seemed to Her Perfectly Natural”: Portraiture as Teaching Strategy in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (74)
Student to Student: Stein and Crimes of Convention (79)
Narration and American Identity in Stein’s Later Prose Works (87)
Engaging Gertrude Stein’s Wars I Have Seen as Secondary Witnesses (94)
Poetry and Portraits (101)
Teaching Diversity to Undergraduates via Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and Other Texts from Selected Writings (101)
The Tender Buttons of Avant-Garde Self-Assertion: Teaching Gertrude Stein’s Feminism (107)
Teaching a Compositional Approach to Gertrude Stein’s Portraiture (114)
“A Violent Kind of Delightfulness”: Enjoying Tender Buttons (121)
Approaching Tender Buttons from Three Directions (130)
“What Is the Difference”: Teaching Gender and Sexuality in “Patriarchal Poetry” through a Cultural Studies Approach (137)
“To Say Which of Two”: Reading Stanzas in Meditation in the Undergraduate Classroom (144)
Plays and Operas (151)
Exercises in Group Analysis: Sounding Out Stein’s Plays (151)
Performing Stein, Inviting Affect (158)
“To Know to Know to Love Her So”: Teaching Gertrude Stein’s Operas to First-Time Stein Readers (164)
A Seriously Playful Pedagogy for Gertrude Stein’s Late, Great Opera, The Mother of Us All (172)
Creative Principles (178)
A Rose Is a Rose Is a . . . Thesis Statement: Gertrude Stein in the First-Year Writing Classroom (178)
“All Alone with English”: Teaching Stein in a Multilingual Context (184)
“The Inside on the Outside”: Teaching Stein’s Lectures in America (190)
Pictures, Portraits, and Resemblance (196)
Someone Puts a Stein Apple Together: Ways to Widen a Workshop (202)
The Bothersome Pleasures of Teaching Stein (210)
Notes on Contributors (217)
Survey Respondents (221)
Works Cited (223)
Index of Works by Gertrude Stein (241)
Index of Names (243)
