Upstaging the “Death of the Subject”. Gertrude Stein, the Theater, and the Self-Differential Self
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Pieter Vermeulen
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.
Articles in the same Issue
- Consequences of Bad Weather in Medieval Literature. From Apollonius of Tyre to Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron
- Altersschwelle 30/33. Zur Geschichte einer semantischen Einheit
- Puppetry in Eighteenth-Century England and Germany, and in the Nachtwachen von Bonaventura
- Max Dauthendeys “japanische Novellen” in Die acht Gesichter am Biwasee – Literarischer Exotismus oder schon interkulturelle Literatur?
- The Creative Power in the Failure of Word and Language. On Silence, Stuttering and other Performative Intensities
- Meine Sprache und Ich. Ilse Aichingers Zwiesprache im Vergleich mit Derridas Le monolinguisme de l'autre
- “My mind is the subject of these bewildered fragments”. La défaite de l'homme et la défiguration progressive dans le théâtre de Sarah Kane
- Upstaging the “Death of the Subject”. Gertrude Stein, the Theater, and the Self-Differential Self
- Identifikation einer Frau – Terézia Moras Ophelia
- Rezeptionsmodelle in Milan Kunderas Roman L'immortalité
- Im Netz der Gewalt. Der Terrorfilm zwischen Horror, Zeitgeschichte und medialer Berichterstattung
- Rezensionen
- Adressen der Mitarbeiter
Articles in the same Issue
- Consequences of Bad Weather in Medieval Literature. From Apollonius of Tyre to Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron
- Altersschwelle 30/33. Zur Geschichte einer semantischen Einheit
- Puppetry in Eighteenth-Century England and Germany, and in the Nachtwachen von Bonaventura
- Max Dauthendeys “japanische Novellen” in Die acht Gesichter am Biwasee – Literarischer Exotismus oder schon interkulturelle Literatur?
- The Creative Power in the Failure of Word and Language. On Silence, Stuttering and other Performative Intensities
- Meine Sprache und Ich. Ilse Aichingers Zwiesprache im Vergleich mit Derridas Le monolinguisme de l'autre
- “My mind is the subject of these bewildered fragments”. La défaite de l'homme et la défiguration progressive dans le théâtre de Sarah Kane
- Upstaging the “Death of the Subject”. Gertrude Stein, the Theater, and the Self-Differential Self
- Identifikation einer Frau – Terézia Moras Ophelia
- Rezeptionsmodelle in Milan Kunderas Roman L'immortalité
- Im Netz der Gewalt. Der Terrorfilm zwischen Horror, Zeitgeschichte und medialer Berichterstattung
- Rezensionen
- Adressen der Mitarbeiter
