Shucks, we’ve got glamour girls too! Gertrude Stein, Bennett Cerf and the Culture of Celebrity (original) (raw)
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Copywriting Gertrude Stein: Advertising, Anonymity, Autobiography
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.
Rhetoric Review, 2012
In 1934 Gertrude Stein returned to the United States, for the first time in thirty years, to give her Lectures in America. Approaching the delivery of her lectures within their historical context, mediating communicative shifts from the nineteenth-century novel to twentieth-century publicity, and accounting for distinctions between speaking and writing, Stein used public relations strategies to capitalize on her celebrity and to introduce audiences to her modernist compositional processes. The lecture tour became an occasion for engaging the public relations culture that dictated the terms of her image's circulation and for retheorizing delivery in an age of publicity.
Prospects for the Study of Gertrude Stein
Resources for American Literary Study, 2020
Perhaps more than any other modernist, Gertrude Stein's exhilarating though sometimes exhausting genre-defying writing invites ongoing philosophical, aesthetic, and cultural explorations of and engagement with language, grammar, indeterminacy, conventional expression, and nonlinear modes of reading and writing. For decades, a continuous stream of single-author, book-length studies; a steady succession of peer-reviewed articles; frequent coverage in the mainstream press; and an enduring influence on contemporary artists and writers have all indicated that Gertrude Stein's work and legacy still capture the scholarly and popular imagination. This article offers resources for scholars and students interested in Stein studies, provides an overview of Stein's work, considers trends in past and current criticism, and discusses possibilities for new areas of inquiry.
Collaborating with Gertrude Stein: Media ecologies, reception, poetics
Collaborating with Gertrude Stein: Media ecologies, reception, poetics, 2018
Collaborating with Gertrude Stein Media ecologies, reception, poetics Solveig Daugaard Academic dissertation Academic dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Language and Culture at Faculty of Arts and Sciences to be publicly defended on Friday 25 May 2018 at 13.15 in Key 1, Campus Valla by Solveig Daugaard. Abstract The reception of the American avant-garde poet, playwright, art collector and salon hostess Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) has to a wide extent taken place in an aesthetic context prior to her work’s academic and hermeneutic canonization. This thesis is in part a mapping of this transmedia reception as it is played out in a North American context in the period from her death and until today, and in part an account of Stein’s particular collaborative poetics, through which her work invites such a reception. Furthermore, the thesis maintains that we in a contemporary context are experiencing a still increasing receptivity towards Stein’s oeuvre, that seems more relevant today than ever before. These circumstances, the thesis illuminates and discusses via a media theoretical framework, where Stein’s own work, as well as its aesthetic reception is considered embedded in a complex media ecology. Media ecology is here conceived as a decentralized, networked approach to aesthetic phenomena, which is able to contain many types of agents and materialities. The media ecology of an artwork is thus potentially made up by the entire network of processes, agents and materials that are relevant to its production, distribution and consumption and influences the subject positions available to the individual agents. Through Stein’s aesthetic reception it is possible to catch sight of important components that are active in the media ecology but often neglected or considered subordinated to text-internal features. These include the material interface of the medium in question, the aestheticized persona of the artist and infrastructures such as the salon, which affect how and to whom the work and its meaning is distributed. The thesis also traces a number of parallels between the media situation of Stein in the beginning of the 20th century and the digital media situation at the verge of the 21st that suggest both explanations for and implications of her increasing contemporary relevance. Keywords: American poetry, Gertrude Stein, media ecology, reception, poetics, collaborative poetics, media poetics, ambient poetics Department of Culture and Communication Linköping University, SE-581 83 Linköping, Sweden ISBN 978-91-7685-309-2 ISSN 0282-9800 ISSN 1403-2570
Gertrude Stein, movement and media
Elena Johnson, 2013
The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the ways in which the rise of new forms of technological and artistic expression like photography and cinema influenced Gertrude Stein’s philosophy and work, allowing her to solve the dilemma of how to write the relation between movement, the essence of the world, and the viewer’s perception of it, without resorting to mimesis. Central to that apparatus and to Stein’s work are two ideas developed in Stein’s essays: firstly the notion of the repetition of an image, of an action, of a sound; and secondly the illusion that what the spectator/reader, is enjoying is really taking place hic et nunc, somewhere in a sort of fourth dimension free of temporal boundaries. The dissertation argues that the modern media are the fundamental means through which Stein’s methodology develops. Through an analysis of three central generically-specific examples (Tender Buttons; the portraits; and the plays), the dissertation attempts to show how relevant chronophotography and cinema rather than Cubism were to her understanding of movement. I suggest that not only had new media affected Stein, the reverse was also true: by challenging traditional cognitive and narrative methods and by making use of the latest technological inventions available in order to identify, capture and portray the essence of existence, Stein stretched and surpassed the artistic languages available to her to such an extent that some of her later plays had to wait until new technologies were invented, in order to be realized. I conclude by suggesting that it was not until the advent of digital puppetry and the internet with its a-spacial, atemporal and self-referential status that Stein’s continuous present could finally find an expression.