A vocabulary of thinking : Gertrude Stein and contemporary North American women's innovative writing
"Using experimental style as a framework for close readings of writings produced by late twentieth-century North American women, Deborah Mix places Gertrude Stein at the center of a feminist and multicultural account of twentieth-century innovative writing. Her meticulously argued work maps literary affiliations that connect Stein to the work of Harryette Mullen, Daphne Marlatt, Betsy Warland, Lyn Hejinian, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. By distinguishing a vocabulary - which is flexible, evolving, and simultaneously individual and communal - from a lexicon-which is recorded, fixed, and carries the burden of masculine authority - Mix argues that Stein's experimentalism both enables and demands the complex responses of these authors." "Building on the tradition of experimental or avant-garde writing in the United States, Mix questions the politics of the canon and literary influence, offers close readings of previously neglected contemporary writers whose work doesn't fit within conventional categories, and by linking genres not typically associated with experimentalism-lyric, epic, and autobiography - challenges ongoing reevaluations of innovative writing."--Jacket
Criticism, interpretation, etc
x, 214 pages ; 25 cm
9781587296130, 1587296136
153578936
Starting with Stein : three vocabularies of thinking
Domestic economies : Harryette Mullen's Trimmongs and S*PeRM**K*T
Re-versing the lyric : Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland's Double negative
Multirelational authobiography : Lyn Heijinian's My life
Found in retranslation : Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's DICTEE
Epilogue : returning to Stein