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Upstaging the “Death of the Subject”. Gertrude Stein, the Theater, and the Self-Differential Self

  • Pieter Vermeulen
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 5. Oktober 2010
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While Gertrude Stein is often celebrated as a proto-postmodernist whose formal experiments destabilize traditional notions of subjectivity, a reading of her little-discussed Lectures in America reveals that her poetics actually relies on the anxious suppression of the threat of the loss of a sovereign form of subjectivity. Following Rei Terada's distinction between subjects and “self-differential selves,” it can be shown that Stein's theory of the emotions and her account of the emergence of her poetics theorize the theater as the site of an inescapable encounter with the self's difference from itself. By deploying an elaborate rhetoric of the uncanny, the lectures aim at containing the threat of the loss of a strong subjectivity by locating it in the theater alone.

Published Online: 2010-10-05
Published in Print: 2010-September
Heruntergeladen am 13.1.2026 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/arca.2010.008/html
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