Gertrude Stein | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 59 pages of analysis & critique of Gertrude Stein.

Gertrude Stein | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 59 pages of analysis & critique of Gertrude Stein.
This section contains 15,907 words
(approx. 54 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Lisa Ruddick

SOURCE: “‘Melanctha’: The Costs of Mind-Wandering,” in Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis, Cornell University Press, 1990, pp. 12–54.

In the following essay, Ruddick determines “Melanctha” to be Stein's conscious break with nineteenth-century literary standards.

Gertrude Stein thought of herself as having spent her life escaping from the nineteenth century into which she had been born. This [essay] is about the ambivalent beginnings of that escape. With the story “Melanctha,” Stein made her first leap into modernist modes of representation; she herself described the story (immodestly but plausibly) as “the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century in literature.”1 Yet the text looks backward at the same time.

“Melanctha” carries on a private conversation with William James, Stein's college mentor and the central figure in the early drama of her self-definition as a modernist. Along one of its axes, Stein's story reads as a...

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This section contains 15,907 words
(approx. 54 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Lisa Ruddick
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Critical Essay by Lisa Ruddick from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.