Seeing Stein’s Masculinity

2018 ◽  
pp. 39-67
Author(s):  
Chris Coffman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
September 11 ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Man Ray

“Seeing Stein’s Masculinity” analyses the shifting significance of visual images of and written texts about Stein. Driven by recent reinterpretations of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the gaze, this chapter reads his theories against the grain to counter arguments about the visual that reproduce binary thinking about gender. Queering his account of the gaze makes it possible to register the expanded array of masculinities mobilized in photographs of Stein by George Platt Lynes, Henri Manuel, and Man Ray as well as in their recent reception during the 2011 Seeing Gertrude Stein exhibit in San Francisco. Moreover, Stein’s own comments in The Autobiography about being photographed by Man Ray queer the heteronormative gaze that drives James Agee’s review of that book in the September 11, 1933 issue of Time whose cover featured Lynes’s image of Stein in profile. Tracking changes that have taken place between the early twentieth century and the present in attitudes toward her queer sexuality and masculinity, this chapter argues that traces of abjection remain in contemporary reactions to Stein despite greater acceptance of her gender, sexuality, and innovative writing.

Ugliness, Underground, Queer Difference

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Yetta Howard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Theoretical Overview

The introductory chapter of Ugly Differences provides a theoretical overview of the book and its central interventions on the concepts of ugliness and the underground. It turns to early-twentieth-century examples by Gertrude Stein and Claude McKay to frame genealogical connections between ugliness and queer female difference. This literary history highlights the roles that avant-garde, experimental, primitivist, and vernacular approaches to cultural production play in reflecting nondominant subjects whose differences are routed through de-privileged sites of the aesthetic.

scholarly journals Enlightenment on the Spirit-Altar: Eschatology and Restoration of Morality at the King Kwan Shrine in Fin de siècle Seoul

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 273
Author(s):  
Jihyun Kim
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Qing Dynasty ◽  
Critical Period ◽  
Ethical Values ◽  
New Era ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Korean Empire

The period from the Treaty of Kanghwa (1876) until the fall of the Korean Empire (1897–1910) is commonly characterized as a period of kaehwa—Enlightenment—in which the Chosŏn state strived to reform and modernize. This article complicates the notion of Enlightenment in the late Chosŏn context, arguging that it was a hybrid term concurrently connoting modernization and religious awakening. In particular, this article sheds light on spirit-written texts—so called ‘morality books’—employed by civil and military elites to participate in Enlightenment discourse. By the mid-nineteenth century, Guandi—the apotheosized version of the warrior Guan Yu—had emerged as one of the most popular spirit-writing deities in Qing dynasty China. This article explores the Korean faith and practice of spirit-writing centered on Thearch Kwan (Ch. Guandi) at shrines in Seoul. The King Kwan Shrines (Kwanwang myo) were the sites of production and publication of morality books during a critical period on the eve of modernization of Korea. Surprisingly, these texts were published with the sanction of King Kojong (reigned 1863–1907), the reformer who founded the new country. Kojong and his confidant servants were fully aware of the spirit-written texts and published them as the “Corpus of Enlightenment.” The corpus unintentionally emphasized the key term of modernization in their eschatology, urging enlightenment—conceived of as religio-ethical values—in order to resolve contemporary ills and bring about a new era of peace. This research will dissolve the sharp demarcation between premodern and modern in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Korea by illuminating the polyphony of Enlightenment ideas, comflicting and competing between the old and new.

scholarly journals William Henry Fox Talbot. The Pencil of Nature. Chicago: KWS Publishers, 2011. 164p. ISBN 978-0981773667. $149.95

2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-201
Author(s):  
Sarah Passonneau
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Man Ray ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
William Henry Fox Talbot

Rediscovering William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, the first commercially produced photography book, led my mind back more than 20 years to when, as a young photographer, I studiously devoured the lessons wrought from the photographers Eugène Atget, Man Ray, and August Sander. One day as I sat in a verdant backyard absorbing books filled with images by these three photographers, my father plopped The Pencil of Nature by my side. In his quiet but immutable manner he said, “He [Talbot] did it first.” Atget, a late nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century photographer, took more than 5,000 pictures of Paris and . . .

scholarly journals Copywriting Gertrude Stein: Advertising, Anonymity, Autobiography

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-350
Author(s):  
Rod Rosenquist
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ordinary Objects ◽  
Public Expectations ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Twentieth Century America

This article traces the parallel, though in some ways inverted, early careers of Gertrude Stein and Helen Woodward: one a celebrated but little-read modernist author and the other a widely-read but largely anonymous copywriter. The first section draws comparisons between early twentieth-century changes in advertising copy and Stein's literary innovations, focusing on the techniques used by Stein and copywriters like Woodward to direct attention to ordinary objects or promote branded products by appealing to the individual reader's experience and subjectivity. The second section goes on to consider the contrasting definitions and public expectations of the author within the contexts of high modernism and modern advertising, respectively. The article concludes with brief analysis of the techniques of attribution, promotion and anonymity within the autobiographies of these two writers, suggesting that the contrast in approaches to life writing were largely due to how creative and corporate authors held highly contrasting public positions in early twentieth-century America.

The Passion Projects

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melanie Micir
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Extensive Body

It's impossible, now, to think of modernism without thinking about gender, sexuality, and the diverse movers and shakers of the early twentieth century. But this was not always so. This book examines biographical projects that modernist women writers undertook to resist the exclusion of their friends, colleagues, lovers, and companions from literary history. Many of these works were vibrant efforts of modernist countermemory and counterhistory that became casualties in a midcentury battle for literary legitimacy, but that now add a new dimension to our appreciation of such figures as Radclyffe Hall, Gertrude Stein, Hope Mirrlees, and Sylvia Beach, among many others. The book explores an extensive body of material, including Sylvia Townsend Warner's carefullly annotated letters to her partner Valentine Ackland, Djuna Barnes's fragmented drafts about the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Margaret Anderson's collection of modernist artifacts, and Virginia Woolf's joke biography of her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, the novel Orlando. Whether published in encoded desire or squirreled away in intimate archives, these “passion projects” recorded life then in order to summon an audience now, and stand as important predecessors of queer and feminist recovery projects that have shaped the contemporary understanding of the field. Arguing for the importance of biography, the book shows how women turned to this genre in the early twentieth century to preserve their lives and communities for future generations to discover.

Oyster Growers and Oyster Pirates in San Francisco Bay

2006 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW MORSE BOOKER
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
American West ◽  
San Francisco Bay ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Privately Owned

In the late nineteenth century San Francisco Bay hosted one of the American West's most valuable fisheries: Not the bay's native oysters, but Atlantic oysters, shipped across the country by rail and seeded on privately owned tidelands, created private profits and sparked public resistance. Both oyster growers and oyster pirates depended upon a rapidly changing bay ecosystem. Their struggle to possess the bay's productivity revealed the inqualities of ownership in the American West. An unstable nature and shifting perceptions of San Francisco Bay combined to remake the bay into a place to dump waste rather than to find food. Both growers and pirates disappeared following the collapse of the oyster fishery in the early twentieth century.

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