Richard Wright and Gertrude Stein

1982 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 107
Author(s):  
Eugene E. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Richard Wright

scholarly journals “Sketches of Spain”: Richard Wright's Pagan Spain and African-American Representations of the Hispanic

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 487-502 ◽  
Author(s):  
GUY REYNOLDS
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Western World ◽  
Saul Bellow ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Abstract Expressionist ◽  
The Republic

At the start of Pagan Spain (1957), Richard Wright recalled a 1946 conversation with Gertrude Stein; she encouraged him to visit Spain: “ ‘You'll see what the Western world is made of. Spain is primitive, but lovely. ’ ” Wright meditated on his fascination with that country, an obsession rooted in the Civil War's political upheaval: “The fate of Spain hurt me, haunted me; I was never able to stifle a hunger to understand what had happened there and why” (PS, 10). Wright wrote as a leftist, as a political writer who had published anti-Franco articles. In his interest in Spain, and especially in his “hunger to understand” its fate after the fall of the Republic, Wright kept company with many mid-century American artists. Hemingway is the most famous instance of a writer engaged with Spanish affairs, but forms of Hispanophilia have marked the lives of many writers and painters. In his account of a trip to Madrid in 1947, Saul Bellow recalled: “ ‘And then of course I had followed the Spanish Civil War and knew as much about what had gone on in Spain between 1936–8 as a young American of that time could learn.’ ” At around that time, the Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell was creating his series of Elegies to the Spanish Republic, a parade of largely black canvases dominated by oblique representations of archetypal Spanish subjects such as bullfighting. As Arthur Danto has written of these images: “ ‘Spain’ denotes a land of suffering and poetic violence and political agony, and ‘Elegy’ carries the literary weight of tragedy and disciplined lamentation. ”

Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright: The Poetics and Politics of Modernism

1999 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
Timothy Dow Adams ◽  
M. Lynn Weiss
Keyword(s):  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Richard Wright

Readies for Bob Brown's Machine

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Carlton Brown
Keyword(s):  
Text Messaging ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Internet Media ◽  
Facsimile Edition ◽  
Viewing Screen ◽  
Writing Technology

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.

Musical and Literary Portraiture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Walden
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Literary Portraits ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Poetry And Music

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.

Crumbling into Dust

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Levi Barnard
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Unfinished Business ◽  
Black Newspapers ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
David Walker ◽  
Historical Times

This chapter situates Chesnutt’s writing within a tradition of black classicism as political engagement and historical critique extending from the antebellum period to the twentieth century and beyond. Reading Chesnutt as a figure at the crossroads of multiple historical times and cultural forms, the chapter examines his manipulation of multiple mythic traditions into a cohesive and unsettling vision of history as unfinished business. In the novel The Marrow of Tradition and the late short story “The Marked Tree,” Chesnutt echoes a nineteenth-century tradition that included David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, and writers and editors for antebellum black newspapers, while at the same time anticipating a later anti-imperial discourse generated by writers such as Richard Wright and Toni Morrison. Chesnutt provides a fulcrum for a collective African American literary history that has emerged as a prophetic counterpoint to the prevailing historical consciousness in America.

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