The natives return: Henry James and Gertrude Stein in America

My dissertation examines the American lecture tours of two "unreadable" expatriates, Henry James and Gertrude Stein, focusing on the questions of nationhood, authorship, and modernity these writers confronted in the United States. In my introduction, I examine Stein's emphatic promotion of James as her "forerunner," and show how her use of James participates in a wider modernist identification with "The Master." What could Stein have meant when she wrote that "Henry James knew he was on his way" to her own work, and what would James have made of this Jewish, lesbian, self-proclaimed "genius" who claimed to have recognized and fulfilled his unrealized narrative promise?;My first chapter examines James's 1904--1905 tour, and my second chapter follows Stein's parallel tour thirty years later. I focus closely on the lectures, letters, journals, and journalism that both writers produced during their journeys, exploring their constructions of themselves as protagonists in an ever-thickening American plot, and showing how they position themselves in relation to a national language and literature. James was alienated by what he saw as the American indifference to the values that made his writing legible; Stein, by contrast, worked hard (and often against the grain) to define her writing in American terms. I show how the publicity of both writers fed on their famously "private," inaccessible literary styles, and trace their ambivalent responses to their new-found American celebrity.;In my final chapter, I turn to James's The American Scene (1907) and Stein's Everybody's Autobiography (1937). Both writers were, as James put it, "restless analysts," and in these works they analyze the vast American landscape, the characteristic modes of American transportation and architecture, and the increasingly hybrid American culture to support very different visions of the possibilities of authorship in the United States. While James saw in the United States the erasure of his writing, Stein, through an effort of imaginative will, argued that an American logic would ultimately elucidate---and vindicate---her most difficult texts. In Everybody's Autobiography, Stein replaces James's historically-grounded ideal of "mastery" with a geographically-minded ideal of "genius," making the United States safe for (and symbolic of) modern art, and positioning herself, an American, as the exemplary modernist.