Psychophysics to Literary Experiments: Gertrude Stein and Neural Composition

The last chapter returns to automatisms and the concept of the reflex arc as they were investigated and rethought in Gertrude Stein’s early writings. Critics frequently analyze Stein’s work by reference to William James, one of her teachers at Harvard. Only a few think it important that Hugo Münsterberg, the German physiological psychologist, supervised most of her work in the Harvard psychology laboratory. I argue that Stein sided with Münsterberg against James’s interest in split personalities and his belief that they explained automatic writing. Stein conducted an experiment to discount such ideas, and in the process she discovered her process of allowing automatism to foster invention in composition. But, eventually recoiling from Münsterberg’s aim to exploit unconscious physiological automatisms for industrial efficiency and social order, Stein later experiments in Tender Buttons with ways to escape such determined responses in the creation of meaning.

Literary Neurophysiology

Writing about neurophysiology more than a century ago, what were US authors doing? Literary Neurophysiology: Memory, Race, Sex, and Representation in U.S. Writing, 1860–1914 examines their use of literature to experiment with the new materialist psychology, which bore upon their efforts to represent reality and was forging new understandings of race and sexuality. Sometimes they emulated scientific epistemology, allowing their art and conceptions of creativity to be reshaped by it. Sometimes they imaginatively investigated neurophysiological theories, challenging and rewriting scientific explanations of human identity and behavior. By enfolding physiological experimentation into literary inquiries that could account for psychological and social complexities beyond the reach of the laboratory, they used literature as a cognitive medium. Mark Twain, W. D. Howells, and Gertrude Stein come together as they probe the effects on mimesis and creativity of reflex-based automatisms and unconscious meaning-making. Oliver Wendell Holmes explores conceptions of racial nerve force elaborated in population statistics and biopolitics, while W. E. B. Du Bois and Pauline Hopkins contest notions of racial energy used to predict the extinction of African Americans. Holmes explores new definitions of “sexual inversion” as, in divergent ways, Whitman and John Addington Symonds evaluate relations among nerve force, human fecundity, and the supposed grave of nonreproductive sex. Carefully tracing entanglements and conflicts between literary culture and mental science of this period, Knoper reveals unexpected connections among these authors and fresh insights into the science they confronted. Considering their writing as cognitive practice, he provides a new understanding of literary realism.

Rereading, art-making and other joys: toward a theory of information, repetition and the good life

PurposeThis paper offers a conceptual discussion of repetition and joy in the context of information and their relation to the good life.Design/methodology/approachJoy is defined as an integrative element of the good life which can be achieved through repetition. This may be surprising, given that our most ready-to-hand associations with “repetition” are negative in tenor rather than positive. Building on the work of repetition theorists Søren Kierkegaard and Gertrude Stein, we can discern three different forms of repetition: that looking backwards (e.g. rereading), that looking forwards (e.g. art-making) and that looking inwards (e.g. chiasmus). Throughout this paper, information-related examples are given and discussed as vignettes that move the conversation forward.FindingsThese examples lead to a nascent theory of why the repetition of information can spark joy and not just tedium. First, its stability and predictability that instill comfort in us. Second, its unifying force that brings us to experience wholeness. Third, its invitation to keep the repetition going through creation, further helping us feel part of the world. And finally, its paradoxicality—as strict repetition is impossible—which requires change, paving the way for satisfying surprises and delights.Originality/valueRepetition is a ubiquitous and theoretically interesting phenomenon when it comes to information, and though it is implicit in some information science research, it has not yet been theorized directly. Moreover, this paper connects this issue to an emerging “positive” orientation in information studies.

Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour

Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour examines how the US lecture tour served as a vital infrastructure for bringing regional audiences from all across America into direct contact with international modernists. In doing so, the book reroutes scholarly understandings of modernism away from the magazines and other mass media that have so far characterized its circulation and toward the unique form of cultural distribution that coalesced around public lecturing. More specifically, it highlights the role the lecture circuit played in the formation of transatlantic modernism by following a diverse group of international authors—Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, Gertrude Stein, and W. H. Auden—on their wide-ranging tours through the American landscape. By analyzing these tours, this study illuminates how this extremely physical form of literary circulation transformed authors into commodities to be sold in a variety of performance venues. Moreover, it shows how these writers responded to such broad distribution by stretching their own ideas about modernist authorship. In this way, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour adds to a critical tradition of revealing the popular dimensions of modernism by demonstrating how the tour’s social diversity forced modernists to take on new, more flexible forms of self-presentation that would allow them to appeal to many different types of audiences.

Documentarian

Chapter 4 considers how the US lecture tour provided the expatriate author Gertrude Stein with a chance to reacquaint herself with her native country. The media blitz that accompanied Stein’s 1934–5 tour—she made regular stops for photo ops, book signings, and radio interviews—has prompted critics to examine the way Americans saw Stein as a 1930s celebrity. This chapter is more interested, though, in the way Stein saw America, examining in particular her role as a social documentarian during one of the lowest points in the Great Depression. It specifically analyzes the way she developed a public lecturing practice invested as much in documenting her audiences as it was in speaking to them. It then goes on to compare her lecture-tour memoir, Everybody’s Autobiography, to the state and regional guidebooks being produced at that time by the New Deal’s Work Progress Administration (WPA) to reveal how these two forms of 1930s documentary come together in their renewed belief in the American collective. Finally, the many points of overlap between Stein’s memoir and WPA documentaries become an occasion to question previous readings of the author’s late 1930s politics, which have typically portrayed Stein as a stalwart social conservative.

Modernist salon culture: the contributions of the Stettheimer sisters in 1920s New York

During the 1920s, the Stettheimer sisters Ettie, Florine and Carrie opened the doors of their home in tlie Alwyn Court on West 58th Street, New York, to numerous guests, celebrities, poets and artists including Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Gaston Lachaise, Elie Nadelm~; and Paul Thevenaz, dancer Adolph Bolm, playwright Avery Hopwood, writer Sherwood Anderson, as well as critics Carl Van Vechten, Henry McBride and Paul Rosenfeld. Rivaling the era's famous salons of Gertrude Stein and Nathalie Barney in Paris, collectively the sisters created a literary and artistic salon in which art making flourished. The distinctly feminine decor served as a backdrop for Florine's paintings on display in the salon; Ettie would describe the vibrant salon culture in her autobiographical and fictional writings; and Carrie's role as sartorial experimenter would be inscribed in the sisters' paintings and writings.

Modernist salon culture: the contributions of the Stettheimer sisters in 1920s New York

During the 1920s, the Stettheimer sisters Ettie, Florine and Carrie opened the doors of their home in tlie Alwyn Court on West 58th Street, New York, to numerous guests, celebrities, poets and artists including Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Gaston Lachaise, Elie Nadelm~; and Paul Thevenaz, dancer Adolph Bolm, playwright Avery Hopwood, writer Sherwood Anderson, as well as critics Carl Van Vechten, Henry McBride and Paul Rosenfeld. Rivaling the era's famous salons of Gertrude Stein and Nathalie Barney in Paris, collectively the sisters created a literary and artistic salon in which art making flourished. The distinctly feminine decor served as a backdrop for Florine's paintings on display in the salon; Ettie would describe the vibrant salon culture in her autobiographical and fictional writings; and Carrie's role as sartorial experimenter would be inscribed in the sisters' paintings and writings.