Books

The Composition of Sense in Gertrude Stein’s Landscape Writing

Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Even now, Gertrude Stein’s experimental writing presents obstacles to criticism and baffles readers who complain that it does not make sense. As I propose in this book, in addition to undermining literary conventions Stein’s writing poses an epistemological challenge to the very practice of criticism: she radically revises what it means to make sense, and therefore what it means to explain and to understand.

Drawing on texts of a highly productive period, The Composition of Sense in Gertrude Stein’s Landscape Writing offers an innovative compositional approach to interpreting her work that is in keeping with the unique epistemological insights of this period. By reading in sequence and across the genres of love poetry, plays, anti-narratives, and portraits, I demonstrate that successive texts are members of a sustained compositional experiment in which Stein attempts to render spatial impressions, such as formation, simultaneity and immanence, in literary composition. The surprising result, I contend, is that Stein reprises her concept of knowledge on this model of spatial relations. Through a series of close readings, I trace her challenge to the rationalist principles underlying conventional explanation, and argue that we might change our critical practice to accord with the radical epistemology of her writing.

Click here to read excerpts from the book. https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783319320632

Critical reviews of my book:

“Linda Voris’s The Composition of Sense in Gertrude Stein’s Landscape Writing is, quite simply, a game-changer for Stein scholarship. This important monograph proposes a radical new critical approach to Stein’s work by adopting an interpretative methodology that is both drawn from and receptive to what Voris argues was Stein’s own approach to composition and meaning. . . The virtuosity of Voris’s close readings and the book’s sheer intellectual achievement mark it as a monumental contribution to the field of Stein scholarship. This study firmly establishes Voris as a leading Stein scholar, and her work can be situated alongside the writings of Sharon Kirsch, Janet Boyd, and Sarah Posman, key figures in this growing turn in Stein studies to focus on the writings themselves instead of their author. In Voris then, we finally have the very reader not only that Stein wished for but also that her work so deserves.” –Georgina Nugent-Folan, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Vol. 37 (2), 2018

To read the full review http://lindavoris.org/critical-reviews/

“A stunningly concrete, lucid, and rich account of how Stein’s radical empiricism becomes an imaginative method for establishing for writing the possibilities of a continuous present and infinitely mobile spatial relations. Voris is a supple reader of Modernist painting—so the variety and intricacy of her accounts of Stein’s writing is simply riveting.” –Charles Altieri, Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley

“Voris brilliantly shows that key Stein plays and portraits. . . make perfect compositional sense. This is one of the very best studies of Gertrude Stein to date: it makes the reader SEE how Stein’s difficult but endlessly fascinating ’radical empiricism’ really works.” –Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emerita of English, Stanford University, and Professor Emerita, University of Southern California

“Voris convincingly shows that Stein’s view of knowledge as a composed space requires from us an epistemological shift. If we can manage it, as Stein did, the outcome is liberation from reason’s linearity. This magnificent book is exhilarating on multiple fronts, and it is not only Stein scholars who should avidly read it.” –Lyn Hejinian, poet, essayist and Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley

“This book is a true elucidation (in Gertrude Stein’s sense of the word). This is the most nuanced, attentive, and patient reading of Stein since Ulla Dydo set the bar for Voris to surpass. It will radically alter the landscape, as it were, of modernist criticism.” –Craig Dworkin, poet and Professor of English, University of Utah