Contingency as Medium in Gertrude Stein

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Published: Oct 18, 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/syn.20892
Keywords:
Gertrude Stein contingency Narration Wars I Have Seen Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Everybody’s Autobiography Four in America The Geographical History of America history Second World War
Christine Savinel
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
Abstract

Gertrude Stein questions the event as an external and contingent accident, to be at least subsumed within the continuum of thinking —the untimely flux of interiormeditation and creation. Throughout her prolific production, one of Stein’s majorattempts was to do away with the event in literature, to dispense with it, to play against it. Stein pointedly selected as her topic the contingency of life within historical time, in her several autobiographical texts from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1932) to Wars I Have Seen (1944). Wars I Have Seen proves to be a singular work which helps us realise the process through which Stein resists historical contingency. As this essay argues, Wars I Have Seen gives us a remarkable vision of Stein trying to resist the pressure of History, and a vision of literature trying to hold at bay the contingency of events.

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Author Biography
Christine Savinel, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
Christine Savinel is Professor Emerita at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle. A specialist of American poetry and art, she has published two monographs on Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson et la grammaire du secret (PUL, 2nd ed. 2009) and Poèmes d’Emily Dickinson, au risque du manque (PUF 2009), as well as extensive articles or essays on poetry (Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, George Oppen, Michael Palmer), and on art (Duchamp, Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, or Agnes Martin). A translator of Henry James and Scott Fitzgerald, she has also edited and translated Sylvia Plath’s Diaries (Gallimard). Her latest book, Gertrude Stein, Autobiographies intempestives, was published at Éditions rue d’Ulm in 2017.
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