"Peaceful and Exciting": Habit, Shock, and Gertrude Stein's Pragmatic Modernism

Abstract

This article argues for an alternative modernism, which I call "pragmatic modernism" and define through its affinities with the discursive and philosophical preoccupations of American pragmatism. While histories of modernism have tended to emphasize the "oppositional" legacy of the avant-garde, pragmatic modernism favors recontextualization over revolution, the everyday over the spectacular, and institutions over insurrections. Through the concept of habit, I link the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey to the literary experiments of Gertrude Stein. I argue that gradualism, accretion, continuity, and recontextualization define both Stein's work and pragmatic modernism more generally, and that such an approach suggests both an alternative modernism and an alternative model for contemporary criticism.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 41 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.