Stein a naturalist?

Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 07:02:37 -0400 (EDT)


88'ers:

It may help also to think of Stein is attempting to recover primary
processes of perception. 

In a sense, then, she's very much like the imagists, who wanted to see
things in a new/original way. They wanted to use language to break down
perception into its most basic parts and then to reassemble those parts
barely. (I suppose you could say Stein wants to reassemble those parts
*fully*.)

All this leads Jack Kimball to call Stein a "naturalist"! This may seem an
odd thing to say, but keep reading.

The following statement is from "Gertrude Stein and the Natural World," an
essay by Kimball: 'Although we may not readily see this, Stein is a
naturalist in an experimental mode, reconstituting the natural by way of
experiments in form and discourse. Stein's objective is to recover primary
processes of perception and thought and, as she reasons, "to express
things seen not as one knows them but as they are when one sees them
without remembering having looked at them" (Picasso).'

Help?

--Al

---

navigate 88v: schedule | key | home | PAPERs | | m a i l the s t a f f