Massive modernism: Reading Gertrude Stein and company.

Abstract

Taking Gertrude Stein's <italic>The Making of Americans</italic> (1925) as my central example, I show how modernism is imagined as an intervention into the public sphere. This novel's professed aim of reaching readers, coupled with its conception as a text that makes America, demonstrates the public imagination of modernism. Through the study of Stein's archival materials, I discover the contradictions within modernism's public imagination. These materials illuminate on the one hand, the novel's engagements with mass culture and debates on immigration, and on the other hand, the process by which Stein produced a private meditation on family, America, and character. This novel is often unreadable because it lacks referents, but these referents are preserved in archival materials. Paradoxically, it is through the study of archival materials that the novel's engagements in the public sphere come to light. Each chapter uses different archival materials to study the tensions between modernism's public imagination and private modes of expression. Chapter one examines <italic>the transatlantic review</italic>, the first site of publication of <italic>The Making of Americans</italic>. My second and third chapters concentrate on the novel's unpublished drafts and notebooks. The novel began as a personal history replete with the names of Stein's family members and friends, and colored by the Jewish traditions that marked their lives as immigrants from Germany. But in later drafts, the discussion of Jewish ritual disappears, as do the references to friends and family. Chapter two reads the disappearance of the novel's Jewish content in the context of 1908, the year these manuscript changes occurred and the year that Israel Zangwill's play, <italic>The Melting Pot</italic>, was performed. Chapter three considers the elimination of personal details. Disputing modernist notions of impersonality, I compare Stein to Ronald Firbank and understand impersonality as a marketing strategy that provoked readers' curiosity about authors. Chapter four studies Stein's archive of clippings and focuses on parodies and advertisements that mimic her language. At the same time that Steinian advertisements mock her difficult style, these ads explain her aesthetic to the American public. In 1934, these ads helped <italic>The Making of Americans </italic> to achieve a brief public life.