Gertrude Stein and the politics of grammar.

Title: Gertrude Stein and the politics of grammar.
Identifier: AAI9707155
identifier: 9707155
Creator: Smedman, Lorna J.
Contributor: Adviser: Nancy K. Miller
Date: 1996
Language: English
Publisher: City University of New York.
Subject: Literature, Modern | Women's Studies | Language, Rhetoric and Composition | Literature, American
Abstract: This dissertation develops a method of reading Gertrude Stein's innovative texts through an analysis of her use and abuse of particular grammatical laws. Stein's concern with syntactic and semantic conventions can best be understood in the contexts of poststructuralist linguistics, and feminist and queer studies explorations of the connections between language and representation, sexuality and politics. Her identities as a woman, a lesbian, and a Jew made Stein wary of the way language categories were arbitrarily organized. Even more so, she resisted the rules governing relationships between words according to their classes. Stein's struggle with issues of signification involved a vision of a "democratic poetics," which would ignore the inherent hierarchical organization of word classes. In the more innovative texts, she also attempted to "queer" regular syntax, opening up a space for a freer relationship between words which could express a nonheterosexist erotics.
Type: dissertation
Source: PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
degree: Ph.D.