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An indispensable companion to Gertrude Stein's masterpiece, The Making of Americans. One of the great works of 20th-century American fiction, Stein's novel represents a peak of modernist literature: filled with repetition, overlapping and disintegrating plots, innumerable characters, and sentences stretching over pages. It is an immensely rewarding book, but also a potentially frustrating one. At last, Cecilia Konchar Farr and Janie Sisson offer a reader's guide-the first of its kind. As I Was Saying is proof that The Making of Americans is not unreadable as charged, and offers accessible entry to the experimental writing Stein valued and promoted most-the original modernist novel by the era's most influential author.
List of contents
Part One
Introduction
“The Long Unmaking of The Making of Americans,” by Cecilia Konchar Farr - Biography: “Becoming Gertrude Stein," by Janie Sisson
- Publication History, by Janie Sisson
- Early Reception: “Damned naughty Gertrude," by Cecilia Konchar Farr
- Archival Insights: The Continuous Making of The Making of Americans
Part Two: Reading the Novel
Chapter One The Narrator, They: Metafictional Authorial Intent- Chapter Two The Modernist Sentence: They are All of Them Repeating
- Chapter Three On Being American: Geography, Nationality and Class
- Chapter Four Lesbian Subtexts: The Unmaking of Patriarchy 81
Part Three: Summary
Cast of Characters- Illustration: Family Tree
- One:
The Dehnings and the Herslands, The Hersland Parents, Mrs. Hersland and the Hersland Children, Martha Hersland - Two:
Alfred Hersland and Julia Dehning - Three:
David Hersland - Four:
History of a Family’s Progress
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
About the author
Cecilia Konchar Farr is Dean of the College of Liberal and Creative Arts at West Liberty State University in West Virginia where, in addition to her work as dean, she teaches, researches, and writes about higher education, popular literature and the history of the novel. She is author of
The Ulysses Delusion: Rethinking Standards of Literary Merit and
Reading Oprah: How Oprah’s Book Club Changes the Way America Reads, and editor of several essay collections. An English professor, feminist theorist, and faculty advocate, she lives in Pittsburgh, just across the river from Gertrude Stein’s first home.
