Writing that counts: Gertrude Stein and the mathematics of modernism (William James, Bertrand Russell)

Taking as a focal point Gertrude Stein's effort to construct a logical foundation for literary representation, this dissertation examines the theoretical implications of mathematical models in American modernism. Stein begins her career by addressing a particular problem: how can something be represented whole when we acquire our knowledge of it piecemeal, and only gradually over time? Her earliest full-length novel, The Making of Americans, presents one solution, using a thousand pages of repeated but slightly varied character descriptions to give readers a cumulative sense of the essence of each character. But how much repeating is enough? Stein acknowledges that concluding her long novel was really matter of arbitrary choice, and that the whole it sought to represent was at best an approximation. For Stein the alternative to approximating the whole of something through cumulative experience is to construct a logical abstraction that captures the essence of all possible parts without requiring any experience with particular parts. “ wanted my writing to be as exact as mathematics,” she says, and it is this mode of mathematical abstraction that dominates her middle and later work, and marks her abandonment of an experience-derived, or phenomenological, model of representation for a strictly logical model. As a consequence of this shift, Stein's literary projects no longer aim to reproduce experience but rather to construct the grounds of its possibility.; Driving Stein's turn to mathematical abstraction is a distrust of experience, memory, and history that characterizes American modernism more generally. Among the starker incarnations of that distrust are Williams's denunciation of all previous literary forms as “plagiarism” and Marianne Moore's claim that “there are no proof-readers” in America, meaning that in America there is no tradition (and hence there are no standards) against which to read American writing. Stein's importance in the history of modernism is not, however, just her particular stylistic innovation as such, but her ambition for that style to be representative of a wholly modern American writing, which for her involves constructing a literary language capable of achieving the completion and consistency of mathematical language (before Gödel).