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37 - Stein, Hemingway, and American modernisms

from PART THREE - MODERNISM AND BEYOND

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2011

Leonard Cassuto
Affiliation:
Fordham University, New York
Clare Virginia Eby
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
Benjamin Reiss
Affiliation:
Emory University, Atlanta
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Summary

The emergence of a reading public for American fiction was, as chapter 36 shows, a gradual and often contested one. And even as audiences for novels and short stories grew, continuing worries about the moral “dangers” of fiction were compounded by the appearance of new modernist forms which called in question the most fundamental conventions of imaginative narration. Modernism would mean many things, but in its deepest impulse it sought radical alternatives to the novelistic realism that by the beginning of the new century had become fiction's dominant mode. Gertrude Stein, born one year after the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's A Library of Famous Fiction, would lead a modernist assault on familiar notions of character and action in the novel that would also shape the hugely influential but very different writing of her most famous pupil, Ernest Hemingway.

Stein's principal complaint about nineteenth-century fiction was that it made narration the creature of memory; as she put it in a 1934 lecture called “Portraits and Repetition”:

slowly I realized this confusion, a real confusion, that in writing a story one had to be remembering, and that novels are soothing because so many people one may say everybody can remember almost anything. It is this element of remembering that makes novels so soothing. But and that was the thing that I was gradually finding out listening and talking at the same time that is realizing the existence of living being actually existing did not have in it any element of remembering and so the time of existing was not the same as in the novels that were soothing.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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