Gertrude Stein’s Innovative Grammar in ‘A Carafe, That is Blind Glass’

Nicole Gantz

Critical Essay

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As a prototypical piece of modernist work, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons often synthesizes complex and unique connections in the reader’s mind while simultaneously exposing the boundaries of their own literacy. The average reader will give up quickly, while there is a 50/50 chance a scholar would rather fling it into the sun than analyze it. Put another way, as this anonymous review in the Detroit News so colorfully declares: “After reading excerpts from [Tender Buttons] a person feels like going out and pulling the Fime Bank building over onto himself.”¹ In this way, Stein’s style is maddeningly confrontational. When challenged to make sense of her distorted and disruptive version of English, our impulse is to conform or rebel.² It is instinct, primally automatic, and the subjective significance we impose on her language must be repeated to make sense of it. Thus, repetition—in language, activity, and behavior—carries the weight of obligation; it is a commitment to practice, to remember, to habituate a state of conscious progress.

Whether it be in body or mind, to repeat ourselves is to memorialize ourselves. After all, identity, as we know, is a matter of difference. The con/denotations of the language we use, the context of our experiences—we recognize ourselves in relation to the language we understand and the objects we encounter, and then generalize to abstract representations into conscious repetitions. Whether it’s as multifaceted as a conspiracy theorist’s blog or as uncomplicated as a toddler’s board book, one does not need to be especially wise to chase the Chora–ever elusive, entirely indeterminate–and lay claim to its perceived effects. In this way, humanity is but a story of conquest, and we have chosen language as our champion.

When conceptualized through Ferdinand de Saussure’s language model, our quest for meaning is necessarily determined through a reciprocal relationship between signifier and signified. Saussure’s theory of signs proposes an explicitly repeatable arrangement within an implicitly impressionable process. This, perhaps, is most quickly exemplified by the “Analogy” section of the SATs:³

Language: Words as Tender Buttons: _____

a.) Poetry

b.) Sex Acts

c.) Discourse

d.) Nonsense

It is a restriction of expression to which the only remedy is more of the same. Thus, the ever-present question: How do we answer a call we have no recourse to truly understand? But of course, it must be poetry.⁴

In poetry, repetition complicates and compounds an already aporetic process of meaning-making by mediating rhythms of undefined consciousness. Repetition under the sign/signifier model presupposes thought; it takes the unaltered conditions of one’s experience for granted. When used more creatively, repetition can be a harmonious tool, offering meaning without imposing it–but so too can it be weaponized by rejecting convention in favor of revolution. Writers of both poetry and prose challenge institutions of power by manifesting the unreadable in the liminal, which makes the use of repetition even more significant in practice. The space between the same word, sound, or definition–how do we name these spaces without desecrating meaning itself? Much like the difference between repetitions, the discursive conditions of the interval are beyond complete definition. It is objects that we so boldly define and abstract meaning from. So, is it any wonder it is the objects of our everyday lives that so often seduce poets into creation?

One of the best examples of this seduction is Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, which devotes an entire section to objects. Stein, notorious for her exacting language play, approaches the signifier/signified relationship with an air of disobedience, employing labyrinthian syntactical structures and perverting semantic processes to illuminate objects through their intersections rather than their significations, thus liberating both object and subject from strict definition. In this way, Stein demonstrates how one’s grammar can resist convention by disrupting the utility of the noun, so it only approximates a signifiable reality. As an example, I have created—perhaps inadvisably—an exercise in grammar according to this proposed design, thus ensuring authorial intent:

Candlestick

Incomplete resemblance. What is the rain. A series of prescriptives, a visage diverge decline. How we come celestial spouse. An affair of complete incidence of forgiveness matters of the worst peak unordered in duplicate, not division in sensed relations. A vibration contingency of matter elusive. Never incomplete.

This is a grammar in action. To make sense of it, the language must communicate the rules of its own engagement. The noun is emboldened by its intersections—the material descriptions are interchanged with attributes of language, the intertextuality speaks to physical appearance and utility, and the semiotic deviations encourage alternate definitions and perspectives. I give the candlestick texture by repeating its name in a myriad of ways; you follow its presence through its intersections with other signs. The subversions in syntax refuse resolution; you are offered but a suggestion of meaning. In the shadow of Stein’s brilliance, this little exercise cannot claim comparable intention or control, but it does amount to the same proposal: “Suppose a grammar uses invention.”⁵

No stranger to innovation, Stein’s work is often more suggestion than method. In both poetry and prose, Stein offers strings of words without a clear framework for definition, tempting the most masochistic readers with the arduous task of puzzling together both sign and signified, context and meaning. To be clear, it would be a mistake to claim Stein’s use of language is arbitrary, but–to be sure–she does capitalize on language’s arbitrary nature. As she explains, she has specific approaches to language in her work, which are different for prose and poetry:

Prose is the balance the emotional balance that makes the reality of paragraphs and the unemotional balance that makes the reality of sentences [. . .] prose real prose really great written prose is bound to be made up more of verbs adverbs prepositions prepositional clauses and conjunctions than nouns. […] The vocabulary in respect to prose is less important than the parts of speech, and the internal balance and the movement within a given space.⁶

Poetry is I say essentially a vocabulary just as prose is essentially not. [. . .] It is a vocabulary entirely based on the noun as prose is essentially and determinately and vigorously not based on the noun. Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns.⁷

Thus, in Stein’s prose, she writes: “If to say it if to see it if to say it. If to say it. The point of it the point is this, that point at that point and twenty at that point and not twenty if you see and if you say it.”⁸ And, assuming that example has not completely turned you off from Stein, this is what we are offered in her poetry:⁹

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.¹⁰

This poem, “A Carafe, That is Blind Glass,” is the first in the “Objects” section of Stein’s Tender Buttons. Like most of the work featured in this volume of poetry, this poem can be read as a meta-deconstruction of Stein’s own use of language. As a relatively uncomplicated exercise in “caressing” nouns, here is one (rather reductive) way we can read “A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass:”

The carafe is a kind of blind glass–but, thankfully, it has a cousin that is a spectacle. This spectacle is nothing strange… but its halved and bleeding status might cause a spectacle if it is not repaired in time to see that the single hurt color must be read. Reading involves an arrangement of letters in a system that should point to meaning, but all of this, lived objects and their meanings, are extraordinary and therefore not easily ordered or differentiated. The difference between the carafe and the blind glass is spread along the infinite deferral of each noun’s meaning.

Certainly, it could be argued that it is not straightforward to explicate Stein’s poem as a playful challenge to read “a single hurt color” as “read”, but Stein, with her impish disregard for syntax, elevates vocabulary to celebrate the quotidian. She nourishes the objects she studies, giving them an unordered texture of pure expression set against the backdrop of everyday life. As Elizabeth Frost suggests in “The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry,” “Stein’s interest is clearly in signifying — in engaging the reader in the process of ‘meaning something,’ not simply in the material pleasure of the signifier. [. . .] At the same time, though, Stein refuses to give up the palpable existence of the noun as an object, physically felt.”¹¹ In this way, Stein’s resistance to traditional grammar also invites more discursive analyses. As her language flows erratically across the page, between the lines, and beneath the surface, we are drawn to its intertextuality. With paradoxically vaunting and reticent technique, Stein’s focus on everyday objects, combined with the piece’s silent omissions and peculiar inclusions, synthesizes discursive conditions unique to early-twentieth-century society–particularly regarding both language and gender roles.

Two years before Tender Buttons was published, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” an essay with remarkably similar attributes to the aforementioned toddler board book and conspiracy theorist’s blog. Futurism, a violent and misogynistic sub-movement within Modernism, aggressively advocated for the complete destruction of tradition–including (but not limited to) archives and museums, relationships and family structures, and–perhaps most significant for this reading–language conventions. He writes,

One must destroy syntax and scatter one’s nouns at random […] one must abolish the adjective [. . .] abolish the verb [. . .] abolish even punctuation [. . .] [t]o render the successive motions of an object, one must render the chain of analogies that it evokes, each condensed and concentrated to a single word.¹²

While Marinetti’s crusade against syntax in poetry shares Stein’s focus, his technique only produces a series of nouns. From this manifesto, he offers, “man-torpedo-boat, woman-gulf, crowd-surf, piazza-funnel, door-faucet.”¹³ By removing the parts of speech that break up nouns, Marinetti argued Futurist poets would “invent what I call the imagination without strings [l’immaginazione senza fili].”¹⁴ For a bit of fun,¹⁵ let us recall my “Candlestick” exercise and apply Marinetti’s method of syntactical destruction. If we remove everything but physical nouns, depending on how one signifies “matter” and “peak,” we would end up with a few possibilities: rain-spouse-peak, rain-spouse-peak-matter, or rain-spouse-matter. Of course, it is not exactly fair to use Marinetti’s method of poetry, as he would likely write “candlestick” if he found himself with an overwhelming urge to write poetry about it. But what does this tell us about the object’s nature? How does the signifier of a thing encompass our relationship to it? As a violent misogynist,¹⁶ perhaps Marinetti was not so concerned with how everyday objects could nourish his existence, especially objects closely associated with domesticity (i.e., feminine tasks). In contrast to Marinetti, Stein’s innovative poetry sought to explore the noun’s interactions with other parts of speech, to celebrate the object by subverting its signifier. As Frost argues, “Stein privileges the noun as a loved object.”¹⁷ Through subversions in semantics, syntax, and sound, Stein rejects, repeats, and relocates the noun to expose the precarious nature of one’s vocabulary. This desire to uncover the noun’s limitations coincides very well with her focus on repetition and the everyday, for, as Rita Felski points out, “everyday life is not simply a neutral label for a pre-existing reality but is freighted down with layers of meanings and associations.”¹⁸

In her essay, the “The Invention of Everyday Life,” Felski discusses a strictly immanent woman enslaved by the repetitive tasks that prevent her from progress. Under the patriarchy, repeated behaviors that ensure the survival of our species–tasks like cooking, cleaning, and childcare–are most often relegated to women. Though progress has improved this gendered space, there is still an alarming number of men utterly incapable of stir-frying vegetables, putting dishes in the sink, or—most concerning—filling out their children’s medical history. Just as linguistic repetition is an imposition on thought itself, everyday repetition can be an order of compliance under systemic institutions of power. In this way, everyday repetition–for many women–is a lesson in domesticity; it is a sentence to the quotidian. Understanding repetition through both language and women’s oppression exposes the reality of it: Repetition is not a circle but a cairn, a building of moments, stacked and balanced. Every stone erects a new arrangement, every hand produces unique forms of tension. Thus, as Felski theorizes, repetition can serve as a framework for existence, whether it be through natural or social cycles. However, as Stein so brilliantly demonstrates, repetition of the quotidian can also lead to innovation: “That which was previously taken for granted becomes newly visible, in both its new and its traditional, disappearing forms.”¹⁹

So, the question must then become, how do we trace innovation in repetition? One potential answer to this question attempts to qualify an indeterminate aspect of existence: Time. Though Felski’s focus on repetitive everyday life is a response to modernism’s preoccupation with innovation and rejection of imposed subordination, it is also a complementary commentary on the gendering of time and space.²⁰ She writes, “[t]ime is not just a measurement but a metaphor, dense in cultural meanings [. . .] the distinction between ‘time’s arrow’ and ‘time’s cycle’ is also a distinction between masculine and feminine.”²¹ In other words, time—as a measure of subjective determinacy—can be applied and understood differently according to one’s identity–including (but not limited to) gender. If we look at Marinetti’s poetry, there is a distinct linearity to it, a (wildly ineffective) projectile quality that attempts to eliminate alternative paths to meaning. In contrast, time in Stein’s poem can be read as a dual performance of indeterminacy: on one hand, a linear expression of time that exposes the noun’s inefficiency via repetition. On the other, there is a cyclical expression of time that illuminates the discursive conditions of the quotidian and offers a potential escape from the banality of strict definition.²²

A linear reading of Stein’s “A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass” approaches nouns concretely. The title features a noun that has been qualified by an attributed second noun. It is oddly phrased, which may be why the first clause of the first sentence, “a kind in glass and a cousin,” reworks the title to read: a quality in glass and a carafe. This retelling of the title has two changes: the glass is now foregrounded, and the glass has been disentangled from the carafe: it is now a blind glass and a carafe rather than a carafe, that is a blind glass. The second half of the first sentence is also a retelling of the title, but this repetition is detailed to the point of convolution and adds a new element. Starting from the beginning of the sentence, we can understand “a spectacle” to be one half of a pair of glasses, “and nothing strange” as the ease of identifying an object: “That is a ___.” Finally, “a single hurt color in an arrangement in a system to pointing” is a carafe of a “hurt color”–perhaps red wine. The second clause can then come to mean: a blind glass that is a carafe of red (wine). Apparently displeased with the carafe’s addition, the second sentence excludes not only “red,” but the entire carafe. “All this and not ordinary,” can be translated to “a spectacle,” and “not unordered in not resembling” is a dominating and overwritten “nothing strange.” Therefore, the second sentence simply becomes: A blind glass that is a…

“Difference” is the first noun with specific signification. By design, it is unclear what is being differentiated but being the only noun with a clearly intended signifier (“The”), it is just as likely “difference” refers to nouns themselves. The nouns used to describe “glass” and “carafe” progressed until the “carafe”–and its sexually reproductive allusions–were eliminated. The original sentence’s innovation spread to the point of the carafe’s extinction. The similarity to Futurism’s desire to eradicate the need for women is particularly relevant here, especially when the quality given to “glass” is blindness. As Frost notes, Marinetti (and the other woefully imbecilic Futurists like him) saw “the male body as a modern form of reproduction that would happily sidestep the biological reproduction that depends on the female body. In the new world, masculine potency would eliminate the female and certainly the feminine.”²³ With this in mind, eliminating the carafe mimics Futurism’s propaganda: Stein highlights the spread of differential space between signifier and signified to demonstrate the momentum toward the noun’s obsolescence: The sentence without “carafe” is left without an ending. This reading of “A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass” tries to move linearly, but it must return to its origins and then repeat itself to get where it wants to go. Unfortunately for the “blind glass,” its final destination is devoid of meaning. In other words, the noun in this linear reading of the poem—much like Marinetti’s “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature”—is entirely impotent by the end of it.

The “cousin” of the poem’s linear interpretation is the cyclical one, a flowing narrative that uses repetition to signal progress within the everyday domestic tasks traditionally reserved for women. Going into the poem with this understanding, the title instantly softens. Though the glass is still blind, its blindness may signal life. Giving an object an ailment like blindness personifies it, gives it some basic form of sentience. Naming the glass “carafe” not only changes the signification from “glass” to “carafe,” it also implies an emotional connection. Naming can be a maternal practice, and naming an object birthed from another often invokes feelings of love and devotion. Linguistically, signifiers may provide some clarity in conversation, but “carafe” in this poem is not specific enough to identify which carafe the poem is about (note the ambiguity here being in accordance with Stein’s distaste for naming). The only temporary solution is to compare it to other objects: “carafe” and “not carafe.” Stein’s title accounts for this to some degree by specifying that “carafe” is blind, which then changes the differentiation process to: “blind carafe,” “not blind carafe,” or “not carafe.”

Moving to the first line in the poem, “a kind in glass” seems to refer to a type or variety of something in glass, something with “a cousin.” However, kinship, assonance, and alliteration also connect “cousin” to “carafe” through “glass,” making it possible that there is more than one cousin or more than one set of similar “kinds.” The second half of the first sentence is much longer: “a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing.” “Spectacle” could be interpreted as half of a pair of glasses again, especially because the glass is blind. However, “and nothing strange” implies that “a spectacle” refers to a visual display of some kind, but one that is rather common. Red, being the universal “hurt color,” could then refer to one “kind” of an object that would share attributes with the objects previously discussed. Something, perhaps, more feminine and presented in multiples, something “in glass” and in “an arrangement in a system to pointing.” In other words, the cousin of the “blind carafe”– the not “blind carafe”–is performatively a vase (of proposed red flowers). Stein’s containers–like language–maintain connections between our chosen objects. As Joseph Cunningham points out in “‘Wittgen-Stein:’ Toward a Creative Philosophy of Language,”

Stein calls these containers “occasional” because we simply construct them in a way which fits with our expectations and perceptions of the world. They are arbitrary orders imposed on an otherwise indeterminate world in which everything is “simply different,” if we can only resist over-conceptualization on the basis of resemblance and remain open to seeing everything anew.²⁴

Our fascination with objects–with seeing them, owning them, fondling them–compels us to contain them, to make sense of them. For Stein, as I will continue to argue, the everyday objects we covet are best enjoyed outside of confinement. Wine must be poured, flowers must be seen–both carafe and vase remain open for utility, but the noun restricts what can be contained. More on this later.

The second sentence of “A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass” reveals that the arrangement (perhaps of flowers) is ordered in its dissimilarity and is considered extraordinary. For this reason, the triple “not” may read as optimistic—perhaps even loving, given the theme thus far—rather than a sign of dissent. The lack of noun in the second sentence invites the reader to hear “not” as “knot”—a classic symbol of love and devotion. A triple knot implies a truly profound love, a love that is “all this.” It is often claimed that Stein coded her long-time lover, Alice Toklas, into her writing to celebrate their love but also hide their relationship from a homophobic society. With that in mind, “all this” could very well be “Alice.” Alice is love. Just as the “blind carafe” is constructed for a specific purpose, so too is the “not blind carafe;” the difference here is what Stein suggests could be inside. In her refusal to definitively define the noun, Stein infuses fluidity into the noun’s expression–which is of particular interest when read beside the lesbian eroticism that permeates the poem. The noun is cherished here, repeated over and over through its myriad connections.

The final sentence, “the difference is spreading,” comes immediately after the dissimilar arrangements, so the “difference” may refer to the “kinds” of objects being arranged (our proposed flowers) that are “in glass.” As it is implied at the beginning of the poem that there are two sets of cousins, we can now identify them as a set of arrangements and a set of glasses. Thus, the difference in arrangements involves how they are spread “in a system to pointing.” This can be read as a bouquet of flowers, as I’ve previously suggested, but this difference in “spreading” also carries an erotic charge when its connection to the glass is considered. As previously discussed, the glass in this poem has at least two identifiable markers as a container–a blind carafe or a not blind carafe. As both forms are vessels, it is their utility that differentiates them: the blind carafe is used to dispense wine or water, and our not blind carafe–our performatively a vase, carafe–is used for water to keep flowers wet (take that as you will). The blind carafe is a carrier–it dispenses; it facilitates the filling of other vessels. In contrast, a vase is a receptacle–it receives; it houses the bodies or emissions of other objects. Read this way, the sole physical object of this poem is sexed. The ontogenetic nature of the noun “glass” suggests a more primal fluidity that is then restricted by an anthropomorphized binary according to utility. However, just as a carafe can perform as a vase, a vase can perform as a carafe: it is the arrangement of objects within the vessel that decides its expression.

In this reading, the fluid nature of the object is embraced; it is recognized in multiple arrangements–though, as the carafe’s “blindness” demonstrates, manners of expression will make some arrangements more useful than others. The differences in these arrangements are in their manner of “spreading.” If we return to the utilitarian view of the carafe, the “arrangement in a system to pointing” depends on the use of the object: in a carafe, liquid spreads as it is shared; in a vase, liquid encourages flower petals to spread. In one arrangement, we have a carrier without a designated receiver; in the other, we have two receivers. The eroticism here–lesbian, specifically–is an excellent example of what Frost calls Stein’s fetishization of the object: “Engaging with the necessarily symbolic nature as well as with the materiality of words — the pleasure they offer through the physical experience of speech — Stein makes her words into fetishes, linking questions of sexual identity to those of language and delivering a multiplicity of both sensuality and sense.”²⁵ Subverting preordained delineations of an object’s arrangements and their “systems to pointing,” this metaphor honors the beloved nature of “carafe” as both an object and a subject, as both a giver and receiver of feminized sex, without categorically denying the materiality of the object. It is a dual “caressing” of the noun, rather than a complete severing of its intersections. In this way, the sexual coding surrounding these everyday objects transforms masculine propulsion (as read in the ejaculatory “blind carafe”) into a feminist sexual revolution.

Though the sex-positive feminist movements of Stein’s time pushed back against “social purists,” or people who “identified lust as a male quality opposed to women’s more asexual, spiritual natures,”²⁶ these movements were almost exclusively heterosexual. Thus, the “not blind carafe” as a symbol for lesbian sexuality recognizes both the value and freedom in cyclical repetition specific to women not so tightly caged by patriarchal domesticity. In this way, “A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass” is undoubtedly a testament to the power and potential of language, but it can also be read as a bruising commentary on Futurism and how its technology-based focus blinded its proponents to the extraordinary value of everyday objects stripped of strict definition. Frost writes, “Stein’s prose and poetry reflect not the forward thrust of the mechanical but a pace slowed by repetition; further, the recurring linguistic motifs in her writing center on domesticity, erotic exchange, and a fascination with ordinary objects.”²⁷ Where Marinetti inexpertly stripped his nouns (as one would expect of a man who doubted women’s contribution to survival), Stein seduced hers with a lingering touch under an experienced hand. Thus, with her innovative grammar, Stein answers one call to find meaning by honoring what Futurists wanted to leave behind: She imbues objects with sexual liberation, thereby creating a normative space for lesbian domestic pleasure. Thus, the conditions of difference that create just enough change to keep an unhappy (heterosexual) housewife complacent in her everyday tasks are subverted by repetitions in sound, meaning, and images that infuse lesbian eroticism into the noun.

After all, a woman can pour the wine and display the flowers, but so too can she become the wine, become the flower. She can be savored. She can be nourished. She can watch her petals stain red as they spread.

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Endnotes

1. Kirk, Curnett, The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein, (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000), 14. ↩︎
2. In physio-psychology, we’d identify these as two of the four Fs of survival: Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn (also known as F… Mate). ↩︎
3. Yes. This example is facetiously contrived to prove a point, but it also demonstrates the subjective determinacy of language. Would the SAT ever contain such a subjective question? Probably not. But the questions are rarely a true measure of academic excellence/potential anyway, so I think my integrity on this one is safe. ↩︎
4. Some will argue prose is just as qualified to bridge this unknowable gap, but I believe–with a few notable exceptions–it is the poets that confront this indeterminacy best. These exceptions are almost entirely composed of the High Modernists who inexplicably wrote pictures, spelled music, defined consciousness–and then dared to call it a novel. ↩︎
5. Gertrude Stein, How to Write, intro by Patricia Meyerowitz (New York: Dover Publications INC, 1975), 56. ↩︎
6. Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America, intro by Wendy Steiner ( Boston: Beacon, 1985), 229-30. ↩︎
7. Stein, Lectures in America, 230-31. ↩︎
8. Gertrude Stein, Geographies and Plays, intro by Cyrena Pondrum, (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1985), 511. ↩︎
9. Though controversial in some literary circles, I will refer to the text in Tender Buttons as poetry, as that is the genre Stein herself assigned it. ↩︎
10. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, (New York: Dover Publications INC, 1977), 3. ↩︎
11. Frost, Elizabeth, “Replacing the Noun: Fetishism, Parody, & Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons,” in The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry, (Chicago: University of Iowa Press, 2003), 12. ↩︎
12. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” Green Integer, (Green Integer Books, Accessed February 19, 2024), 92-94. PDF. https://greeninteger.com/pdfs/marinetti-technical-manifesto-of-futurist-literature.pdf ↩︎
13. Ibid., 93. ↩︎
14. Ibid., 97 ↩︎
15. Though, admittedly, this is perhaps too bold a statement. ↩︎
16. See Marinetti (1909); Marinetti (1912); Blum (1990) ↩︎
17. Elizabeth Frost, “Replacing the Noun: Fetishism, Parody, & Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons,” in The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry, (Chicago: University of Iowa Press, 2003), 13. There are even more explicit comparisons to be made between Stein and Marinetti, most especially in Stein’s poem, “Mary Nettie.” Many scholars read this poem as a direct address to or about Marinetti. Elizabeth Frost, for example, writes: “Stein’s attitudes toward the failings of more militaristic avant-gardist rhetoric is apparent in “Marry Nettie” (1917), in Gertrude Stein Reader, ed. Ulla Dydo; hereafter GSR), an amalgam of poem and disjunctive narrative, which sheds light on Stein’s attitude toward Futurism in general and Marinetti in particular” (8). ↩︎
18. Rita Felski, “The Invention of Everyday Life,” in Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture, (New York: NYU Press, 2000), 30. ↩︎
19. Ibid., 16. ↩︎
20. A cyclical reading of time should not be confused for a cyclical understanding of repetition. Repetition accrues change; time is an indeterminate process of existence–it is change. Time can therefore be read subjectively (i.e., chronologically, cyclically, discontinuously, sporadically, etc.), whereas repetition necessarily relies on the linearity of its sequence. ↩︎
21. Rita Felski, “The Invention of Everyday Life,” in Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture, (New York: NYU Press, 2000), 19. ↩︎
22. Which, for the purposes of this analysis, will be gender and sexuality. ↩︎
23. Elizabeth Frost, “Replacing the Noun: Fetishism, Parody, & Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons,” in The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry, (Chicago: University of Iowa Press, 2003), 7. ↩︎
24. Joseph Cunningham, “‘Wittgen-Stein:’ Toward a Creative Philosophy of Language,” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 30, no. 2, (June 1997), 108. ↩︎
25. Elizabeth Frost, “Replacing the Noun: Fetishism, Parody, & Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons,” in The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry, (Chicago: University of Iowa Press, 2003), 14. ↩︎
26. Ibid., 5. ↩︎
27. Ibid., 3. ↩︎

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Works Cited

Blum, Cinzia. “Rhetorical Strategies and Gender in Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto.” Italica 67, no. 2, (Summer 1990): 196–211. https://doi.org/10.2307/478592.

Cunningham, Joseph. “‘Wittgen-Stein:’ Toward a Creative Philosophy of Language.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 30, no. 2, (June 1997): 93-111. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44029889.

Curnutt, Kirk. The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000. Felski, Rita. “The Invention of Everyday Life.” In Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern

Culture, 77-98. New York: NYU Press, 2000.

Frost, Elizabeth. “Replacing the Noun: Fetishism, Parody, & Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.” In The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry 3-28. Chicago: University of Iowa Press, 2003.

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature.” Green Integer, Green Integer Books, Accessed February 19, 2024. PDF. https://greeninteger.com/pdfs/marinetti-technical-manifesto-of-futurist-literature.pdf

___. “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism.” In Le Figaro, Paris, February 20, 1909. Translated from Italian by Brain, Robert, R.W. Flint, J.C. Higgitt, and Caroline Tisdall, Translated from French by Thames and Hudson Ltd, London., 1973. https://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/foundingmanifesto/

Stein, Gertrude. Geographies and Plays. Intro by Cyrena Pondrum. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1985.

___.How to Write. Intro by Patricia Meyerowitz. Dover Publications INC: New York, 1975 ___. Lectures in America. Intro by Wendy Steiner. Boston: Beacon, 1985.
___. Tender Buttons. Dover Publications INC: New York, 1997.

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Nicole Gantz is a writer and literary critic from Charlotte, North Carolina. She received her Masters in English Literature at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her forthcoming critical essay, “Becoming a Minor Literature: Supposing in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons” will be published in Journal of Modern Literature later this year.

Photo Credit: Lena N. Gemmer is originally from the quiet foggy town of Montara CA where she began her love of writing on her grandfather’s Remington Rand typewriter. Before deciding to pursue an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at University of New Hampshire, she received a BA in English and History from Allegheny College in Meadville PA. As a writer, she believes in connecting to readers on a visceral human level. When she is not in graduate school, you can find her taking photographs or scolding her Norwegian Forest cat Mitchy. Her photography has been published in Burningword Literary Journal, and the Wild Roof Journal. Her essay “Dinosaurs Before Dark” has been accepted at The Bangalore Review.