The Мaking of an Avant-garde Artist: G. Stein in Dialogue with W. James, G. Flaubert and P. Cézanne

Abstract

Analyzing Gertrude Stein's early short story “The Good Anna”, included in the trilogy Three Lives (1909), the article examines the dialogical process of the formation of the author's poetics at the intersection of various discourses dealing with the concept of habituality. Written under the influence of the ideas of W. James and the aesthetic principles of G. Flaubert and P. Cézanne, the story can be read as a “space” within which scientific and aesthetic representation of ordinary interact. I argue that we can treat this juxtapositions of names (Stein, James, Flaubert and Cézanne), not as a result of individual circumstances and personal preferences, but as a manилиifestation of certain zeitgeist. Particular attention is paid to the comparative reading of “The Good Anna” as created under the powerful influence of Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart.” On the one hand, the recognition of Flaubert's influence on the writer is commonplace in Stein scholarship. On the other hand, it has not attracted close attention, paradoxically remaining a frequently mentioned but underexplored issue. The article proves that through her dialogue with Flaubert, Stein develops a special mode of defamiliarization, revealing the complex relationship between the extraliterary automatically emerging speech of everydayness and the literary experimental discourse. The discussion of Flaubert's influence on Stein's development as a modernist author implies, in principle, the need to look at this dialogue from a broader perspective, without reducing it to a special case of apprenticeship with the greats and without forgetting the two-way direction of this contact of texts.

Keywords

• gertrude stein
• gustave flaubert
• william james
• paul cézanne
• defamiliarization
• the trivial as a subject of aesthetic reflection
• american modernism