Gertrude Stein's literary portraits have repeatedly been analyzed in relation to contemporary cubist painting; but the systematic relation of her work to literary portraiture has been neglected. An undertheorized and minor genre, literary portraiture has always carried the burden of a comparison and competition between the "sister arts". Viewed in this context, Stein's changing concepts of portraiture and her experiments with intermediality testify to an increasing self-reflexivity of the genre in modernism, which shifts the focus of (re)presentation to artistic performance. Stein's portraits of Matisse and Picasso are analyzed in detail to show how genre norms are redefined, how techniques from other media are adapted, and how the author struggles with the scene of recognition on which an act of portraiture is invariably predicated.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

As a seminal work of modernism, Stein's Three Lives has often been discussed in the context of Cézanne and cubist painting, but the intertextual relation to Flaubert has rarely been put under scrutiny, even though it is well known that Stein had translated Flaubert's Trois Contes as an exercise, and allusions to this text can be easily traced throughout Three Lives in general and The Good Anna in particular. The following essay argues that Stein's “new kind of realism” (William James) constitutes a rewriting and a radicalization of Flaubert's decomposition of certain key features of realist narration in Un Coeur simple. While Flaubert's narratorial impersonnalité cites and displays the hegemonic bourgeois discourse of his day in his treatment of the servant Félicité, Stein's narrator deals in clearly marked stereotypes in an effort to master the servants; but by mimicking the latter's speech patterns it also reveals the presumptions of social power implicit in the epistemological hierarchy between narrator and character as such. Only when Stein's characteristic device of repetition is analyzed in this vein—as a symptom of the narrator's and the character's habits of parroting clichés, and as an ensuing dehierarchization of narrative structure—can the similarities with Cézanne's painting be fully accounted for.