Cinematicity,Self-reflexivity And Collectivity

With a rather long and productive career,Gertrude Stein(1874—1946)published more than a hundred works encompassing genres of poem,novel,play,essay,criticism and lectures.As a pioneer of modernism and an innovator of language experiment,Stein abandons conventional rules of grammar and syntax.Her unique literary style has exerted notable influences upon the writers of later generations.However,as the language in most of her works is too abstruse,she does not receive the same widespread recognition as her contemporary modernists.Until today,she is as much acclaimed as criticized.The primary cause of the controversy lies in her anti-traditional writing.By adopting Stein’s literary portrait as object of this study,with concepts of cinema,the psychological and philosophical theories that Stein employed in her writing,this dissertation examines the cinematic feature,the self-reflexivity and collectivity in her early fiction,the mid-term poetry and autobiographical writings of her late career.By probing into the three features of her literary portrait,the dissertation illustrates the motives of her language experiment and traces the influence of her unconventional writing from development of cinematic technology,linguistic turn of western thought and scientific turn of psychology from the late 19th century to the early 20th century,to provide a new perspective for understanding her abstruse language.Besides Introduction and Conclusion,the dissertation consists of four chapters.Introduction starts with the illustration of importance of portrait in Stein’s oeuvre and traces the three-stage development of her portrait writing,then presents a literature review of important academic achievements on Stein’s portraits both at home and abroad till present day.By introducing the four elements and defining the terms related to portrait,the core concept of this dissertation,the literary portrait,will be proposed.The introduction ends with the organization of the dissertation.Chapter One offers a glimpse of the development of the literary portrait as a genre by tracing its history from Theophrastus’s On Moral Characters,the acknowledgement of the literary portrait as a genre in the 17th century French literature,psychological portrayal of Charles-Augustin Sainte-B euve,to the imaginative portrait of Walter Pater.By distinguishing the literary portrait from the painted portrait and the autobiography,this chapter regards the literary portrait as a unique cross-genre of fiction and non-fiction,and broadly defines it as the characterizations and portrayals of characters in poems,novels,plays and essay.Chapter Two focuses on Stein’s early novel and poem portraits.By analyzing the audio,visual and ongoing nature with the concepts of meganarrator,secondary narrator,frames,shots and present time of cinema,the second chapter points out that Stein’s portrait is not the objective representation of the subjects but is the record of the portraitist’s observation process of listening,looking and talking,which reflects the feature of cinematicity.Similar to the sound in cinema,the two-fold narrative in "Susie Asado," "He and they,Hemingway," "Cezanne" represents the double narrative of meganarrator and secondary narrator as in the film,temporal adverbs are employed to mimic the pause in speech.Stein endows sounds with meaning by "nearly sound" to express her emotions.Similar to the visual imaging,the micro and macro repetition in The Making of Americans,"Orta or One Dancing" and "Picasso" reproduce the frames,series shots and dynamic vision in the screen,which generates the effect of the persistence of vision as in cinema.Stein abandons the use of metaphors and symbols,and pays attention to the form of the text.The sound and image other than the meaning of the words are used to delineate the character."Signifier without signified" corresponds to the filmic nature.Inspired by cinema time as the time is felt as a present,Stein ignores the plot time and uses continuous present to delineate the behaviors of Martha,Alfred,David and Ada.She brings the behaviors from the past to the present moment.The continuous present blurs the temporal setting and the flow of time in the plot,which frees the time from the linear chronology of past,present and future.The cinematicity breaks the conventional narrative in character portrayal.Chapter Three focuses on Stein’s prose portraits.By analyzing the writing self,the mirrored self and the alienated self,it is intended to reveal that the real subject of the portrait is the portraitist rather than the seeming "subject." With the two-fold narrative,Stein self-analyzes her worry,fear and loneliness in the writing process.With pronouns,parataxis,incoherent syntax and generalized term,Stein makes the subject of the poem ambiguous.She also creates the pseudo dialogue with the persona Toklas,whose prototype is her lifelong partner Alice B.Toklas.Through her eyes,ears and mouth,Stein presents the image of herself.She abandons the established linguistic rules and invited the reader to observe and recognize the real subject of the portrait.Her portrait signifies an inward turn from the mimetic representation of the subject to the observation and introspection within the portraitist.Chapter Four deals with Stein’s novel and play,and examines the collectivity in portrait.Influenced by experimental psychology at the end of the nineteenth century and Otto Weininger’s thoughts,Stein observes the commonality among people.Based on the two experiments she conducted in Harvard,a dimensional scale of prevalent existence of hysteria is devised and characters from her early portraits are analyzed.Characters in works such as The Making of Americans,Three Lives and Two are included into her science of characterology.Besides the scale,the connoted name also displays the collective nature of her portrait.Name is no longer a specific noun but has connotations.By attaching tags to proper name,Stein explores implications of the proper name and points out that people bearing the same name share the same character.By analyzing the commonality among people,Stein’s individual portrait becomes a representative of a collective group.Stein also employs the technique of substitution.With ambiguous pronouns,she deprives the historicity and individuality of her characters and substitutes one for everyone.In the process of reading,the reader is invited to observe the common feature and to identify himself with the characters.Her portrait signifies the turn from an individual to a collective group by observing the commonality among people,establishing connection between the name and character and depriving the individuality.In the conclusion,the dissertation sums up the three distinctive traits by drawing the picture of portrait system,and points out Stein’s innovation in literary portrait and language experiments.The features of cinematicity,self-reflexivity and collectivity lead to the three-fold turn of the portrait.With the process of observation and selfrecognition,the subject of the portrait shifts from the observed subject to the portraitist.With the process of categorization,the portrait turns from the delineation of an individual to a group.As the reader is engaged in the process of observation,recognition and identification,the portrait is no longer a closed text but an open system.By analyzing Stein’s literary portrait,this dissertation is intended to enrich the research scope of current interdisciplinary study of cinema,psychology and literature,and provide new perspectives for Gertrude Stein studies.