Gertrude Stein's “Historical” Living

Abstract

While Gertrude Stein's formal innovations are often considered as attempts to "transcend history," this article argues that Stein worked through history in order to develop writing practices that could reclaim the past in service to an indefinite future. Toward this goal, Stein's early historical texts—especially The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress (1903–1911; 1925)—contest turn-of-the-century American historians' narratives of inevitable national progress. Stein's history book reveals the dangers of creating fixed identities and determined actions and shows, instead, that historical understanding is an unending collaborative practice. The broader goals of this analysis are to disrupt divisions between aesthetic and political practices that the category of "modernism" often implies and investigate modernist formal innovations as political strategies that can work to recreate collective identities.

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