ABOUT THIS BOOK

The first extensive examination of Stein's notebooks, manuscripts and letters, prepared over a period of twenty years, Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises asks new questions and explores new ways of reading Stein. This definitive study give us a finely detailed, deeply felt understanding of Stein, the great modernist, throughout one of her most productive periods. From "An Elucidation" in 1923 to Lectures In America in 1934, Ulla E. Dydo examines the process of the making and remaking of Stein's texts as they move from notepad to notebook to manuscript, from an idea to the ultimate refinement of the author's intentions. The result is an unprecedented view of the development of Stein's work, word by word, text by text, and over time.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

ULLA E. DYDO is Professor Emerita at the City University of New York and is considered to be one of the world's foremost Stein scholars. She is also the editor of A Stein Reader (Northwestern, 1993) and the co-editor of The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (Yale University Press, 1996). She lives in New York City.

WILLIAM RICE (1931–2006) worked with Ulla Dydo on A Stein Reader and with Edward Burns and Ulla Dydo on various editions of Stein’s letters. A painter, he conducted extensive research on Picasso’s notebooks for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

REVIEWS

“This book will . . . radically change the way we read Gertrude Stein. It is an extremely scrupulous and brilliantly documented inquiry into the question that has faced every reader of Stein: How does one word lead to the next? I don’t know of any other critical book quite like this one, and I think that it possibly sets a model for genuine literary biography.” —Peter Quartermain, author of Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe

"[Dydo’s] volume is something much more than just the most thorough reading Stein has ever had; it is a vision . . . of Stein herself. Dydo . . . has raised the bar for criticism and biography alike." —Ron Silliman, Talisman

“Perhaps the most comprehensive and surely the most interesting study of Stein’s compositional process yet attempted.”—Frances Richard, Brooklyn Rail

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations
Note to Readers
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Entrances
The Voice of Gertrude Stein
Reading the Hand Writing
1. 1923: "An Elucidation"
2. 1926: "Composition As Explanation"
3. 1927: "Patriarchal Poetry"
4. 1927: Four Saints in Three Acts
5. 1928: "Finally George: A Vocabulary of Thinking"
6. 1928-30: Georges Hugnet: "George Hugnet"
7. 1928-30: Grammar
8. 1930-31: History
9. 1932: "Stanzas in Meditation"
10. 1932-34: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
11. 1933-35: Lecturing
Notes
Chronological Listing 1923 - 1934
Selected Bibliography
Index

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