Gertrude Stein in the Psychology Laboratory

1965 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Hoffman
2021 ◽  
pp. 156-192
Author(s):  
Randall Knoper

The last chapter returns to automatisms and the concept of the reflex arc as they were investigated and rethought in Gertrude Stein’s early writings. Critics frequently analyze Stein’s work by reference to William James, one of her teachers at Harvard. Only a few think it important that Hugo Münsterberg, the German physiological psychologist, supervised most of her work in the Harvard psychology laboratory. I argue that Stein sided with Münsterberg against James’s interest in split personalities and his belief that they explained automatic writing. Stein conducted an experiment to discount such ideas, and in the process she discovered her process of allowing automatism to foster invention in composition. But, eventually recoiling from Münsterberg’s aim to exploit unconscious physiological automatisms for industrial efficiency and social order, Stein later experiments in Tender Buttons with ways to escape such determined responses in the creation of meaning.


2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl B. Stewart ◽  
Zachary Ahlstrom ◽  
Jamie L. Anderson ◽  
Samantha J. Stegura ◽  
Michael S. Ward

Author(s):  
Robert Carlton Brown

This is the much-anticipated new edition of the important volume of avant-garde writing, Readies for Bob Brown's Machine. The original collection of Readies was published by Brown’s Roving Eye Press in 1931. Despite including works by leading modernist writers including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kay Boyle, F.T. Marinetti, and 35 other writers and artists, this volume has never been re-issued. Like the ‘talkies’ in cinema, Brown’s machine and the ‘readies’ medium he created for it proposed to revolutionise reading with technology by scrolling texts across a viewing screen. Apart from its importance to modernism, Brown’s research on reading seems remarkably prescient in light of text messaging, e-books, and internet media ecologies. Brown’s designs for a modernist style of reading, which emphasised speed, movement, and immediacy, required a complete re-design of reading and writing technology. Complete with a new Preface by Eric White and a new Introduction and a separate chapter on the contributors by Craig Saper, this critical facsimile edition restores to public attention the extraordinary experiments of writing readies for a reading machine.


Author(s):  
Joshua S. Walden

The first chapter examines musical portraits of literary figures. It first explores Virgil Thomson’s multiple works in the genre including his portrait of Gertrude Stein, to interpret the influence of Stein’s modernist literary portraits on Thomson’s compositions. It then turns to Pierre Boulez’s orchestral portrait Pli selon pli: portrait de Mallarmé. Analyzing Boulez’s incorporation of elements of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry as well as the complex and idiosyncratic theories regarding the relationship between poetry and music that Mallarmé developed in his essays. Through the discussion of these portraits, the chapter addresses the crucial role of language in the musical representation of identity.


Author(s):  
Cleo Hanaway-Oakley

This concluding chapter briefly turns to Joyce’s final work, Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce’s cacophonous ‘book of the dark’, with its many references to cinema, forms the centre of a discussion of the emergence of sound film. The importance of touch in both silent and sound film is restated through reference to the film criticism of Bryher, Dorothy Richardson, and Gertrude Stein, and Chaplin’s City Lights (1931), a late silent film focusing on Chaplin’s relationship with a blind flower-seller. The complex interrelationship between sound and image in both film and Finnegans Wake is contemplated through gestalt theory and multi-perspectival ‘figure–ground images’. The chapter concludes by returning to Ulysses, to consider the never-produced Reisman–Zukofsky screenplay and the ways in which the film would, and would not, have affirmed a phenomenological reading of Joyce’s text.


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