Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-rnpqb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-26T05:06:56.727Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - Gertrude Stein, James's Melancthon/a

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Joan Richardson
Joan Richardson
Affiliation:
City University of New York
Get access

Summary

Any literary work, if it accomplishes its purpose, must superinduce in the reader a whole complex of what we are accustomed to call thoughts, emotions and sensations – a state of consciousness, a state of mind; it depends for its effectiveness upon a web of associations as intricate and in the last analysis as mysterious as our minds and bodies themselves.

Edmund Wilson, “Gertrude Stein,” in Axel's Castle

SLOWLY EVERY ONE IN CONTINUOUS REPEATING, TO THEIR MINUTEST VARIATION, COMES TO BE CLEARER TO SOME ONE

It happened that in February 2001 while I was reading and discussing The Making of Americans in one of the graduate seminars where I rehearsed the ideas played out in this volume, news of the mapping of the human genome, seven feet of aperiodic crystal consisting of 3–6 billion nucleotide pairs, was announced and its mapping published on the web. I went immediately to the site and, scrolling through, began to giggle. It seemed as though I were looking at a mapping of the unreeling repetitions and variations of Stein's remarkable verbal experiment. The permutations of the genetic code's ACTG appeared an abstraction of the multifariously inflected phrases running through Stein's amazing text.

I had drafted the sketch of what was to be the chapter on Stein for this volume some time before.

Type
Chapter
Information
A Natural History of Pragmatism
The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein
 , pp. 232 - 252
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×