Unsettling Gertrude Stein: On the Citability of Baroque Gesture in Four Saints in Three Acts (original) (raw)
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The Journal of American Culture, 2019
This article won the William M. Jones Award & William E. Brigman Award for Outstanding Graduate Paper. Abstract: Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s 1934 production of Four Saints in Three Acts, “an opera to be sung,” is unique in its collaborative features and U.S. sociohistorical positioning: text by a Paris-based American writer (Stein), costumes designed by a painter (Florine Stettheimer), choreography determined by a British ballet director (Frederick Ashton), and a cast of all African-American performers. Though Thomson describes the texts’ themes as “’religious life—peace between the sexes, community of faith, the production of miracles’” (Weber 217), the language and performance of this specific event, and the implications of which, prevent such a general theme from emerging. Instead, constructions of blackness through the early-20th-century performing body are at the forefront. When undergirded by Steinien language, the intricacies between language and performance as related to history, time, and race work to negate the ‘religious life’ theme and instead make palpable the early-20th-century U.S. moment. In particular, Four Saints enacts Stein’s ‘continuous present’ conception of time, speech, and action (“Composition” 5), which introduces the questioning of the degrees to which a temporal construct can impact elements of a performance. As a result, this project is an investigation of the relationships between Stein’s specific temporal-historical lens, the collaborative features of the opera’s production, and the text’s early-20th-century sociohistorical positioning.
GERTRUDE STEIN AND OPERA: A DIALOGUE WITH ONESELF
SUMMARY This text sets itself the task to follow a leading tendency in the development from modernism towards post-modernism on the American – and to a considerable extent international - literary scene. One of Gertrude Stein’s puzzling genre-uncertain, meaning-indefinite texts, the opera libretto Four Saints in Three Acts is considered in an attempt to show that problematic interpretation which frustrates reader effort in meaning making produces an effect that, rather anachronistically, comes interestingly close to the parodic potential of late 20th century camp. Travesty of meaning acquires a wealth of dimensions, among which some gender (the author’s) and genre (the text’s) ‘crossovers’ seem to play a central part. It also comes to serve as an important vehicle along one of the main lines of literary development from the early 20th century, the avant-garde, a line which continued with post-modern developments. Following this line helps clarify the shift of emphasis to play and the author and away from meaning and the reader: probably the most important marker of post-modern writing.
How to Remediate; or, Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts
Modern Drama, 2019
• abstract: In this article, I explore the art form of opera as a process of remediation, a particular type of intermediality in which one medium is represented in another. Focusing on the visual domain, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argue that remediation dominates digital media today. The Stein-Thomson collaboration is a fascinating precursor not only because of the writer's and composer's shared attentiveness to experimentation within and across media but also because of their mutual interest in complicating presumptions about aurality. By investigating Four Saints in Three Acts as remediation, we learn how the media of language (visual, oral, and aural) and sound (musical and performed live) participate in intermedial negotiations-and how, when media are combined for and in performance, they act on each other. keywords: remediation, opera, intermediality, word-music relations, materiality of language
PLAYFULNESS AND (UN)-PERFORMABILITY IN GERTRUDE STEIN'S MODERNIST DRAMA
Sidiropoulou, Avra (2018). “Sinais de Cena. Teorias da Critica. Series II, No. 3. “Playfulness and (Un)-performability in Gertrude Stein’s Modernist Drama, pp. 151-67 Abstract Gertrude Stein’s modernist drama can be examined as a case in point of experimental dramaturgy, wavering in its double identity of a verbal text and a blueprint for performance. This paper explores some of the special attributes of modernism in Stein’s writing, highlighting the challenges that have established her as a fundamentally ‘un-performable’ writer, with little consciousness or interest in performance. Notwithstanding the emphatic reliance on linguistic games, repetitions and word constructions as a substitute for dramatic conflict, action and character, in the course of its lifespan, Stein’s drama has displayed signs of development into performative maturity, manifest in a perspicacious understanding of time and space controlled through language and a focus on the audience’s experience of the present, unburdened by considerations of causality and narrative flow. Whether un-performable, or performable within a broader understanding of theatre textuality, Stein’s text-controlled dislocations of identities, spaces and objects, divided and redefined ad infinitum seem to have broken new ground in matters of theatrical representation.
Described by musical critics, directors, and producers as one of the "best" American operas, The Mother of Us All (1947), featuring words by Gertrude Stein and music by Virgil Thomson, provides the critic of performance studies with an instructive yet elusive test case to examine the interactions among language, theatrical practice, and music. At the end of the opera, Susan B. Anthony, the nineteenth-century American suffragette leader, laments her "long life of effort and strife." 1 The moment is poignant and regretful. Historically, and as represented in the opera, after years of arduous effort to acquire the vote for women, Anthony lives to see the word "males" entered into the 14th amendment to the U. S. Constitution (which serves to restrict the vote only to men) and suffrage granted to former male African American slaves-partly as a result of the women's efforts-but never realizes her democratic dream of women's suffrage during her lifetime. Yet this final scene depicts a respectful homage to Anthony by surrounding her with all of the characters who "bow and smile" as the suffrage leader sings the final words in the opera: "My long life, my long life." 2 Two impossible elements, however, destabilize this contemplative realization of Anthony's bittersweet life: not only is she already dead in the context of the libretto, but she is a statue. The opera is a fascinating mixture of nationalistic fervor and critical interrogation of the American political system. One of the crucial ways in which Stein and Thomson perform this critique of national consciousness is through the finale's uncanny monument. In the libretto, Stein stipulates that a "replica of Susan B. Anthony and her comrades in the suffrage fight" be placed on the stage and set in "The Congressional Hall." Situating the statue in the center of the United States' seat of government is a bold relocation of these important women, one that dislodges and then re-imagines historical circumstances to test the limits of both artistic performance and nation-making. Stein's treatment of the monument strategically reevaluates American national identity, particularly in terms of gender, by exploring what constitutes a monument and its relationship to authority. In this way, the exclusion and double standard applied to women in politics is emphatically marked. Attempting not to reinscribe the same model of binary opposi
Journal of Modern Literature, 2024
In Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetics of Theater, Joseph Cermatori returns to and reinvents the perennial figure of excess and opulence. Examining the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Stéphane Mallarmé, Walter Benjamin, and Gertrude Stein, he discovers some latent and manifest strands of seventeenth-century aesthetics and in so doing reformulates a new genealogy of modernism through its recursion to this early modern meta-discourse. Cermatori's generative book thus opens up new paths of thinking into the entanglements of secularity, theatricality, and periodization.