Ways of not reading Gertrude Stein

I situate the controversial critical strategies of “distant reading” and “surface reading” in the reception history of Gertrude Stein, an author whose work was frequently declared “unreadable.” I argue that an early twentieth-century history of compromised forms of reading, including women’s reading and information work, subtends both the technology with which distant reading may be carried out and the ways in which an author’s work comes to be understood as a “corpus.

Experimentalism by contact

This essay considers literary "experimentalism" as a constructed category animated by epistemic virtues, using the case study of "contact" as both anthropological and literary values in the 1920s. Examines Language writing, the work of William Carlos Williams, and the Writing Culture group in anthropology

Environmental innocence and slow violence

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Experimental realisms

Gertrude Stein, now widely canonized as an “experimental” writer, called her story “Melanctha” (1909) “the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century in literature.”1 Her erstwhile mentor, the philosopher and experimental psychologist William James, wrote of it: “this is a fine new kind of realism.”2 Experimental? Realist? Nineteenth-century, or a step into the twentieth

Experimental: American literature and the aesthetics of knowledge

In this bold new study of twentieth-century American writing and poetics, Natalia Cecire argues that experimental writing should be understood as a historical phenomenon before it is understood as a set of formal phenomena. This seems counterintuitive because, at its most basic level, experimental writing can be thought of as writing which breaks from established forms. Touching on figures who are not typically considered experimental, such as Stephen Crane, Jacob Riis, Busby Berkeley, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Gottlob Frege, Experimental offers a fresh look at authors who are often treated as constituting a center or origin point of an experimental literary tradition in the United States, including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore. In responding to a crisis of legitimization in the production of knowledge, this tradition borrows and transforms the language of the sciences. Drawing upon terminology from the history of science, Cecire invokes the epistemic virtue, which tethers ethical values to the production of knowledge in order to organize diverse turn-of-the-century knowledge practices feeding into "experimental writing." Using these epistemic virtues as a structuring concept for the book's argument, Cecire demonstrates that experimental writing as we now understand it does not do experiments (as in follow a method) but rather performs epistemic virtues. Experimental texts embody the epistemic virtues of flash, objectivity, precision, and contact, associated respectively with population sciences, neuroanatomy, natural history and toolmaking, and anthropology. Yet which virtues take precedence may vary widely, as may the literary forms through which they manifest. Bringing it up to the 1980s, Cecire reveals the American experimental literary tradition as a concerted and largely successful rewriting of twentieth-century literary history. She shows how the Language poets, a group of primarily white experimental writers, restored to the canon what they saw as modernism's true legacy, whose stakes were simultaneously political and epistemological: it produced a poet who was an intellectual and a text that was experimental

Everybody's authority

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Everything is dangerous: three new Foucauldian Interventions. [Reviews] Penelope Deutscher (2017) Foucault's futures: a critique of reproductive reason; Sanjay K. Gautam (2016) Foucault and the Kamasutra: the courtesan, the dandy, and the birth of ars erotica as theater in India; Kyla Schuller (2017) The biopolitics of feeling: race, sex, and science in the nineteenth century

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A Sense of the Real: Experimental Writing and the Sciences, 1879-1946

This American literature dissertation offers an account of the critical category of “experimental literature,” arguing that, nebulous as the term appears to be, it is rooted in ideas of scientific experiment that were under debate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While experimental literature is often described in terms of “formal innovation,” this dissertation reads literary form not as an autonomous category in its own right but as an indicator of epistemological investments. Borrowing Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s concept of the “epistemic virtue,” this dissertation argues that experimental literature seeks to produce a “sense of the real,” not by thematically treating scientific ideas or even by emulating scientific methods, but rather by using literary form to negotiate the changing landscape of what constituted scientificity in the first place. Epistemic virtues are the investments, at once methodological and ethical, that define the experimental mode. Experimental authors, this dissertation argues, seek ways for literature to produce knowledge with strong epistemic guarantees. The dissertation begins by reading Émile Zola’s Nana as an early articulation of how literature might engage in research. Nana reveals the centrality of the epistemic virtue of objectivity to Zola’s project, as well as a surprising symbiosis between objectivity and spectacle. A chapter on Gertrude Stein’s undergraduate and graduate scientific research and early writings (through Three Lives) shows that a naturalist version of experimentalism feeds directly into Stein's modernism. A chapter on the poetry of Marianne Moore argues that precision is the key epistemic virtue that Moore deploys, and that precision’s refusal of hierarchy and negotiation of “high” and “low” cultural forms has underwritten the ambivalent reception history of her work. The final chapter reads William Carlos Williams’s late poem Paterson together with Boasian anthropology to argue that Williams’s late poetic image operates as a means of guaranteeing presence

Mycoaesthetics; or, why mushrooms can never run out of steam

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