Composition as Explanation E-Book

Gertrude Stein

• Herausgeber: Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 22

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Gertrude Stein's "Composition as Explanation" delves into the intricate relationship between language and artistic expression. Published in 1926, the essay explores Stein's unique approach to writing and challenges conventional perceptions of composition. With a distinctive prose style, she reflects on the nature of creativity, emphasizing the significance of repetition and abstraction. Stein's work serves as both an exploration of her own artistic process and a broader commentary on the essence of language in shaping our understanding of art.

Leseprobe

Gertrude Stein

Composition as Explanation

Gertrude Stein's "Composition as Explanation" delves into the intricate relationship between language and artistic expression. Published in 1926, the essay explores Stein's unique approach to writing and challenges conventional perceptions of composition. With a distinctive prose style, she reflects on the nature of creativity, emphasizing the significance of repetition and abstraction. Stein's work serves as both an exploration of her own artistic process and a broader commentary on the essence of language in shaping our understanding of art.

Table of Contents

Gertrude Stein

Composition as Explanation

About the Publisher

Introduction

Gertrude Stein, an avant-garde expatriate American writer who lived mainly in France from 1903 until her death in 1946, is perhaps best known for the weekly salons she held in her home, where artists and writers such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Ezra Pound gathered to discuss the ideas and work that would shape the Modernist movement. Stein’s own experimental work, driven in part by her engagement with Cubist painting, pares language from time and narrative and explores the spatial arrangement of words in sentences and the continuity, or disjunction, that their combinations show, as well as the sonic patterns created by speech.

Stein wrote “Composition as Explanation” in the winter of 1925–26 and delivered it as a lecture to the Cambridge Literary Club and at Oxford University that summer. It was published later that year by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press.

Though Stein had already been writing and publishing for two decades before this essay, she was better known as an art collector. The lecture was arranged by poet and critic Edith Sitwell, an advocate of Stein’s work who recognized that a personal appearance might help to engage a wider interest in Stein’s work. Here, for the first time in her career, Stein discusses her approach to writing and the concerns that shaped her early work. While her literary work steers clear of personal address and explanation, in this lecture Stein incorporates both.