Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Stein

Well, I’m not sure how much I can really say about Gertrude Stein and “How to Write”.

I tried approaching the readings for tonight in a couple different ways. First I tried to read pages consecutively to try to discover some kind of flow so that I could begin to understand it more wholeheartedly. This didn’t work for me. I found her work to be so choppy and inconsistent, thus leaving me unable to get into a flow and understand the writing as Stein would’ve intended. I then tried reading a few pages and skipping to different sections of the passage to see if I could find any correlation or overall theme present in the “sentence” section. This also didn’t work so well for me as I ran across the same choppy, nonsensical words and sentences every page I turned. So, my conclusion for Stein is this: I enjoy and admire her attempts to move on from traditionalism and dive into words and structures never before explored, but if she is unable to convey meaning to her readers (as is the case with nearly everybody’s post) then what is exactly is the use or value of her work?

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