A Poetics of Difference:<i>The Making of Americans</i>and Unreadable Subjects

What does it mean to say that a given text is uninterpretable? While there are always the examples of accidental uninterpretability (cases of works that have suffered severe physical damage, texts in real languages not known by readers, references and allusions that were not kept alive as intertexts for other groups), this is not the focus of criticism or hermeneutics. There is a long and important history of purposeful obscurity, of authors who, for whatever reasons, made their texts difficult and challenging for any reader they constructed. Others did this without regard for the readers' responses, or so it would seem, following their own private visions, compositional or generative rules and constraints, or because they were in some sense writing-under-the influence (to cover a group from Plato's poets to the mescaline-induced writing and art of Henri Michaux). The test cases for this article will be drawn from works by authors with a developed aesthetics of functional indeterminacy (such as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce's

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Looking for the One Who Looks Like Some One: The Unmarked Subject(s) in Gertrude Stein's A Play Called Not and Now

Fawcett¹

2010

Modern Drama

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This essay focuses on Gertrude Stein's 1936 work A Play Called Not and Now, often regarded as Stein's most virulent attack on the theatre and the theatre's corruption of selves into simulacra, “entity” into “identity.” But if the play articulates Stein's discomfort with how her rising literary fame complicated her expressions of entity, it also offers a solution to this discomfort within the very theatrical conventions it appears to critique. Employing the methodology of performance studies, which regards performance as a unique medium that, in the words of Peggy Phelan, “becomes itself through disappearance,” this essay locates the centre of the play in its verbs rather than in its nouns and in the authorial presence it refuses to describe rather than in the celebrities it names. The essay begins with a detailed analysis of Stein's repetition of the verb “to look” throughout the play in order to re-examine the often debated question of what Stein meant when she called a work a play.

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A Poetics of Difference:The Making of Americansand Unreadable Subjects

Cited by 4 publications

References 2 publications

'A thing not beginning and not ending': using digital tools to distant-read Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans

'A thing not beginning and not ending': using digital tools to distant-read Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans

Hermeneutic resistance: Four test cases for the notion of literary uninterpretability

Looking for the One Who Looks Like Some One: The Unmarked Subject(s) in Gertrude Stein's A Play Called Not and Now

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