Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Wayne Koestenbaum

Critical Essay by Wayne Koestenbaum

SOURCE: "Stein is Nice," in Parnassus, Vol. XX, Nos. 1 & 2, 1995, pp. 297-319.

In the following excerpt, Koestenbaum describes Stein's poetry as having appealing qualities of indefiniteness and as producing a liberating effect through its lack of focus and disregard of generic restrictions.

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Reading Gertrude Stein takes enormous patience. The skeptical reader might wonder: What if Stein is not worth this level of attentiveness? What if her writing doesn't reward close scrutiny?

Ask of your own life the same hard question: What if you stare fervently into your own mind and discover nothing there?

Stein insists that we enlarge our capacities—even if the enterprise turns out to be bankrupt. Reading Stein, we imagine a literature, a cognition, that demands inordinate latitude and longitude; we hypothesize a literature as vast and self-sufficient as she imagined hers to be. Whether or not Stein achieved it, by reading her we are...
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