Full Description
An indispensable companion to Gertrude Stein's masterpiece, The Making of Americans.
One of the great works of 20th-century American fiction, Stein's novel represents a peak of modernist literature: filled with repetition, overlapping and disintegrating plots, innumerable characters, and sentences stretching over pages. It is an immensely rewarding book, but also a potentially frustrating one.
At last, Cecilia Konchar Farr and Janie Sisson offer a reader's guide—the first of its kind. As I Was Saying is proof that The Making of Americans is not unreadable as charged, and offers accessible entry to the experimental writing Stein valued and promoted most—the original modernist novel by the era's most influential author.
Contents
Part One
Introduction
"The Long Unmaking of The Making of Americans," by Cecilia Konchar Farr
Biography: "Becoming Gertrude Stein," by Janie Sisson
Publication History, by Janie Sisson
Early Reception: "Damned naughty Gertrude," by Cecilia Konchar Farr
Archival Insights: The Continuous Making of The Making of Americans
Part Two: Reading the Novel
Chapter One The Narrator, They: Metafictional Authorial Intent
Chapter Two The Modernist Sentence: They are All of Them Repeating
Chapter Three On Being American: Geography, Nationality and Class
Chapter Four Lesbian Subtexts: The Unmaking of Patriarchy 81
Part Three: Summary
Cast of Characters
Illustration: Family Tree
One:
The Dehnings and the Herslands, The Hersland Parents, Mrs. Hersland and the Hersland Children, Martha Hersland
Two:
Alfred Hersland and Julia Dehning
Three:
David Hersland
Four:
History of a Family's Progress
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
