Gertrude Stein Biography

Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 - July 27, 1946) was a Jewish American novelist, poet, playwright, theorist and collector.

Miss Stein's works are unique and new, she is committed to the innovation of language and text, and has made changes to the language and text. Due to the influence of William James, Bergson and Picasso and other figures of the Cubist school of painting and their ideas, she has watered down or even abandoned the literal meaning of words, and has used them to construct a three-dimensional building, which is directly directed to the depths of the soul of the characters. Ms. Stein enhances the ideological function of language through new language expressions and writing techniques, organically blending painting and language together, making people feel specious, hazy, real and unreal, with a unique feeling. It has had a significant impact on 20th century Western literature.

Chinese Name: Gertrude Stein

Foreign Name: Gertrude Stein

Alias: Gertrude Stein, Miss Stein

Nationality: U.S.A.

Ethnicity: Jewish

Birthplace: Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh)

Death date: 1946

Occupation: novelist, poet, playwright, theorist, collector

Representative works: Miss Hair and Mrs. Pi

Personal history

Gertrude Stein was born in 1874 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, United States, into a Jewish family in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. In his infancy, the family moved from Allegheny to Vienna and then to Paris. Stan learned English and German and then French. Finally, in 1850, the family traveled to the wilderness of Oakland, California, where the father, Daniel Stein, allowed his children to speak only "pure" American English, forbidding them to speak any other language. Daniel Stein was a cold and overbearing man with a minimal formal education. Having made a small fortune investing in cable cars in San Francisco, he hired several tutors for his children, overloading them with homework and expecting too much from them. As children they suffered from their father's constant scolding and survived the harsh controls, while their soft-hearted mother was too weak to disagree. Stan thinks it's foolish to say anything is unpleasant, let alone something as important as childhood.

In 1885, his mother began to show signs of cancer and died in 1888 after several years of suffering. Stan was 14 years old. Left alone and unattended, Gertrude dropped out of high school and fell into what she later called "dark and terrible" days. She read with a fervor, often following Leo's advice, buying stacks of books and devouring them haphazardly.

In 1893, Stan enrolled at Harvard's Radcliffe College for Women in the psychology department. After graduating, he transferred to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he specialized in the anatomy of the human brain and cognitive psychology. She planned to study women's "mysterious afflictions," or hysteria, as it is known. She was y bored with anatomy and did not do well, eventually dropping out of the program and failing to graduate on time.

In 1902, Stan traveled with her brother Leo to France, where they frequented the avant-garde galleries of Paris and became lifelong friends with some of the artists, including Mr. and Mrs. Picasso and Mr. and Mrs. Matisse.

She had been experimenting with literature since 1902. The account of her homosexuality, This Is the Case, was completed in 1903, and in 1906, while sitting for Picasso to paint her portrait, Stan conceived most of the chapters of the book that first won her literary fame. Narrated by Flaubert in the discreetly abridged "Pure and Simple Heart" (which Leo had used as a French-language exercise for her to translate for inspiration), Stan's "Three Women" employs a trio of narratives about three women struggling to survive.

Stan met her same-sex partner, named Alice B. Toklas, in Paris in 1907, and the two have lived together ever since. The word "gay" appears more than a hundred times in Stan's 1922 work Miss Hair and Mrs. Leather, which is considered to be the first novel to give the word "gay" a homosexual connotation. 1908 saw the completion of her 1,000-page book Growing Up American. In 1908, she completed the more than 1,000-page The Making of an American. In 1908, however, she completed her 1,000-page The Making of an American, which was not published until 1925, and in 1909 her middle-grade novel, Three Women, was published to great acclaim. Composed while viewing Cézanne's paintings, this work, with its distinctly Flaubertian style of "Three Stories," and its simple, precise, and concise language, established her as a writer.

In the summer of 1910, Stan and Declas were officially "married" outside Florence. In the fall of that year, Alice moved into Stan's home. In doing so, Alice B. Declas "grew happier than anyone else alive at the time," Stan said in his biographical sketch of her bride, "Ada," and "People in love are almost always listening." Listening and loving and loving and listening.

Stan went on to write such stylistically distinctive works as the Cubist experimental text Soft Buttons (1914), the opera Four Saints in a Play in Three Acts (1929), the French version of Ten Literal Portraits (1930), and A Geographic History of the United States: or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Spirit (1936), as well as the autobiographical work The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933 ), and the documentary The War as I Saw It (1945). In addition, she is the author of the literary treatises How to Write (1927-1931), Lectures in America (1934), and What is a Masterpiece (1922-1936).

During World War I, Stan bought a large Ford station wagon from abroad and learned to drive it, delivering sustenance to hospitals all over France. After the war, she and Alice gave to many lonely British soldiers. The two of them have been adopted as "godchildren" to write to. But in none of Stan's literary writing did she write about this experience of the wounded, the fear, the tenderness. She wrote very little at the time, and spent most of her time advising and mentoring (and sometimes providing meals and grants) to a group of young writers who came to her on the basis of rumors, which, in the 1920s, was like holy writ. One group of painters dispersed, and another group came back. Of these, the one to whom she gave the deepest influence and threw her weight around the most was Ernest Hemingway, then 23 years old. He was always sitting at her feet then, learning how to write like a man.

With the outbreak of World War II and the fall of Paris, Stan and Alice took refuge in the French countryside, and then German soldiers arrived at her new residence and arranged to live in their house. Then later, their house was inhabited by American soldiers. Stan wrote a book, "The War as I Saw It," but it was not published in the American Library of Literature. In fact, it is one of Stan's most important books because it tells the story of the end of the myths and legends. After the war, Stan returned to Paris and this time her salon was filled with American soldiers eating her chocolate ice cream. Stan again took notes on what they all said and how they said it, as if they were the poets of a new age. She herself began to write the lyrical parts of the musical "The Mother of Us All" for her old friend Virgil Thomas, as if to summarize her life. More than a year's work later, when she died of cancer in July 1946, the play was just about finished.

Character Work

Writing Characteristics

Stan created a unique and almost somewhat childlike writing style. This style has influenced writers such as Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. In her works, the author tries to convey what she calls the idea of "persistent existence", thus abandoning the normative rules of punctuation, emphasizing the work of impressions rather than narrative statements, and often repeating the same words and phrases, such as "a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose ". This is a quote from Geography and Drama (1922), perhaps her most famous.

Just as Picasso was an experimentalist in the field of modern art, Stan was a master experimenter in the field of literature with modernist approaches to narrative. She went further than any other 20th-century author writing in English (or any other language, for that matter) in terms of linguistic innovations, technological breakthroughs, and a sense of creativity that transcends modernism and is ahead of its time today. She created her own unique literary language and form, abandoning the traditional, hegemonic, easy-to-understand model of meaning, one that valued referent over reference, one that was seen as patriarchal; she pioneered a rich, complex, open-ended, anti-patriarchal syntactic and semantic model. The most striking features of her writing are repetition, the continuous present tense, and linguistic wordplay, which take her writing beyond a modernist style to a distinctly postmodernist one. "

The word "Rose" is repeated four times in this poem, as are other words. However, it is in this seemingly random repetition that the reader can feel the intensification of the poet's emotions and the flow of his thoughts, and experience a three-dimensional effect from the flat text. Stan has quoted the line many times in his later works, and has also used this repetitive feature of writing throughout.

In addition to the repetition of words and phrases, she uses what she calls a "continuous present tense" narrative. The "sustained present tense" was created by Stein to avoid the destructive effects of traditional notions of time on her writing, i.e., the frequent use of present participles, gerunds, and other verb variations to give the reader the impression that what is being narrated is always fixed in the present moment, creating a sense of "sustained reality. ". This pattern reflects her unique understanding of time, memory, history, and narrative. She believes that psychological time is very important to personal experience, and that writers should accurately grasp human psychological time and capture human momentary consciousness. She eschews memory and emphasizes the present moment. She once said, "We do not live in memories, but in the present." Therefore, most of her works are written in the present tense, often with no chronological order, antecedents or consequences; yet they often try to point to the essence of things in the midst of the apparent clutter of words. This is in line with the postmodernist concept of time as "instantaneous and transient". She has largely expanded the boundaries of historical relativism, which is also in line with the fundamental principle of postmodernism against historical grand narratives.

Stan's work not only emphasizes the use of the "continuous present tense" and repetition, but also frequently undermines traditional syntax and punctuation, eschewing all punctuation except periods. Though seemingly incomprehensible, it reads with a strong sense of rhythm. "Each word is a living presence in Stan's writing, extremely rhythmic and rhythmic. If we read her work aloud, we feel as if we are enjoying the author playing beautiful music. Therefore, it is important to not only read but also listen to Stein's work, playing with the words as we listen." It is much like the black American art of rap, where the repetition and messiness of the sung words are meant to emphasize the rhythm of the music. Reading Stan's works, not only can we enjoy the author's musical language art, but also invisibly establish a unique interactive relationship between the author and the reader - the author trusts the reader's ability to read sentences, while the reader reads aloud to savor the author's intentions. In this open-ended mode of writing, Stan not only subverts the traditional and modern narrative style, but also challenges the literary criticism theory that "the author is dead", so that readers can always feel her presence between the lines and experience the "meaning out of the dust, the wonderful writing". The author's work has been a success.

Stan's literary creation is inseparable from modernist art. Stan and Picasso were lifelong friends and often talked about painting and poetry together. Stan accepted the theory of cubism, and she introduced the art of painting into literary experiments and realized her own literary creation methods, using words instead of pens for three-dimensional depiction, using constant repetition with subtle changes to emphasize the subtle differences between different levels of the same object, depicting the world of still lifes, and reflecting the structure of the world with the structure of the language, reflecting her knowledge of the real world and her style of thinking. For example, in Soft Buttons, Stan gave three portraits made in words to Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso. In Picasso's portrait, the first paragraph reads, "A man whom some people are surely following is a man of total charm. A man whom some people are surely following is a man of charm. A person that some people are following is a person with total charisma. A person some people are following is surely a person with total charisma." Stan repeats these more tongue-twisting sentences over and over again, lending the words an unexplainable abstraction. She does not describe Picasso's physical appearance in any way, nor does she describe his daily life, but by repeating such rakish phrases and sentences over and over again in various paragraphs, she keeps feeding the reader's brain her own attitudes and ideas about Picasso, and in fact, highly praising him.

Stan's modernity is shown in the emphasis on the theme of death. In the opening story "Good Anna" of the novel "Three Women's Lives", Stan describes and shows Annie's development from an energetic, kind and helpful young woman who worked day and night to an exhausted, overworked and depressed death, especially in Stan's brief account of Annie's death in the form of a recorded case, which highlights the tension between Anna's life and death, and the importance of her death. In particular, Stan's brief account of Anne's death in the form of a recorded case highlights the tension between Anna's life and death, and the contrast between life and death reflects Anna's hectic life and unfortunate end. Stan continues to show the heroine's journey from youth to death in "Melanctha" and "Gentle Lena", recording Melanctha's and Lena's deaths in the same way, so that the story's theme of death is sublimated through repetition as the protagonists die again and again. sublimated. The theme of death is also expressed in Stan's description of the death of Anna's favorite dog in "Good Anna," in the opening of "Melanctha," in the death of baby Joan and the death of Melanctha's mother, and in the incident of Jeff taking care of the dying patient. The theme of death is emphasized and makes sense in the deaths of the story's characters.

Stan's later works, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and The Mother of Us All, which on the surface appear to be Stan's compromises with traditional literary creation, are in fact the two masterpieces through which the world learns about the writer herself and one of the pioneers of feminism in American history; in The Autobiography the writer also opens up to the reader about her own distinctive (lesbian) lifestyle and her In the Autobiography, the writer also disclosed to the readers her different (lesbian) life style and her creative psychology and techniques to resist the patriarchal tradition, which on the one hand proved that she was a feminist, and on the other hand let the readers and critics to discover her previous unappreciated works and understand her original creative intention which was not understood and accepted, which could not be said to be the strengths of Stan.

Reviews

The New York Times said of Stan: "Stan's compositions emphasize sound and melody rather than wordiness. Eschewing syntax and grammar in the traditional sense, she tries to abandon time and memory in favor of capturing "a moment of consciousness. Stan's innovations in writing technique and form made her more radical and radical in her opposition to tradition than any modernist writer of her time, and we are forced to recognize her as an experimenter in literary language who transcended her time."

Personal Influence

Nearly every history of 20th-century American literature speaks of her with the coincidental titles of "Hemingway's Mentor" and the spokesman and guide of "`The Lost Generation'". ". She was bold, original and unique in her approach, and her innovations changed the simplistic view of language. Her innovations in literary language can be said to be unprecedented and unrivaled, and she is the "forerunner" of postmodernism. As a leading figure in postmodernism, Stan occupies a pivotal position in the world literary arena. Her salon in Paris was the place where the young generation of artists gathered and exchanged ideas, and it was also a harbor for the "lost generation". Her literary guidance influenced such renowned writers as Ernest Hemingway and Fitzgerald. She coined the term "lost generation" and found the connection behind the disorganization of the second boom in American literature. Stan's style has influenced generations of literary figures.

Postmodernism is a broad-based cultural dynamic that has emerged gradually and painstakingly from the complex process of modernization over the past hundred years. As a result, works from the modernist period are highly likely to be characterized by postmodernism. Shades of postmodernism can be found in almost all of Stein's works, both in terms of writing style and in terms of content and themes. Therefore, we can say that this "mother of chaos" is the forerunner of postmodernism, which became a popular term in the field of literary and art criticism during the 1970s and 1980s, and has been an attractive term in the field of philosophy and culture ever since. The term "postmodernism" became a popular term in the field of literary and art criticism during the 1970s and 1980s, and since then it has been a fascinating theory in the fields of philosophy and culture, and almost all of the world's major thinkers and critics have inevitably become involved in the debate over the postmodernist trend. Many scholars have read Stan's works as a knock on the door to the study of postmodernism; however, Stan's return to tradition from the initial pioneering of postmodernism to the end has in a way foreshadowed the development trend of postmodernist literature, such as fragmentation, collage, juxtaposition, parody, confusion, and focusing only on the present moment and other shortcomings, which have made the literature of postmodernism lose its readership more and more and lose its once strong power. The literature and art are more and more revisiting the present. Literature and art are increasingly revisiting history and tradition and emphasizing ultimate concern. In this era of development towards so-called post-postmodernism, revisiting Stan, a great writer, one feels more and more that she is a prophet writing for the future. Stan's stylistic and thematic innovations, like her own invention of the "continuous tense," have had a lasting impact on literature today and for generations to come. She once said confidently, "I am sure that the 'rose' in this poem will be redolent of English poetry for a hundred years." And rightly so, for almost a hundred years, the poem continued to be quoted in many Western literary works and even in everyday life, such as the words sung in the 1952 Hollywood musical SingingintheRain, the famous biologist Aldous Huxley's grandson Aldous Huxley's The DoorsofPerception ( The Door of Perception (1954) and Brave New World Revisited (1958) by Aldous Huxley, the grandson of the famous biologist Aldous Huxley, The Door of Perception (1954) and Brave New World Revisited (1958) by the Italian Umberto Eco (1932-), Reflections on a Thought (1984), and so on, and even Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, imitated Stan's saying of "The truth about the world is not a thing of the past. Even Margaret Thatcher, the former British Prime Minister, imitated Stan when she said in her speech, "A crime is a crime is a crime is a crime" (Acrimeisacrimeisacrime). The repetition of her style has made the phrase "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" (Roseisaroseisaroseisarose) a popular and familiar verse in Western culture.