Gertrude Stein's Passivity: War and the Limits of Modern Subjectivity

Well into the three-month-long Gertrude Stein exhibit in 2012 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde, legal scholar Alan Dershowitz published the following: By offering a false explanation of how Stein and Toklas remarkably survived the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Texas studies in literature and language 2016-06, Vol.58 (2), p.129-143
Main Author: Dauber, Maayan P.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aesthetics
Author's voice
Authors
Autobiographies
Automobiles
Children
Collaboration
Criticism and interpretation
Holocaust
Literary styles
Modernism
Modernist art
Morality
Nazism
Politics
Realism
Stein, Gertrude
Stein, Gertrude (1874-1946)
Style, Literary
Subjectivity
War
Writers
Writing
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Summary:Well into the three-month-long Gertrude Stein exhibit in 2012 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde, legal scholar Alan Dershowitz published the following: By offering a false explanation of how Stein and Toklas remarkably survived the Holocaust, while living in a town from which dozens of Jewish children were deported to death camps, the Met has distorted the history of the Holocaust and failed to point a finger of blame at collaborators, such as Stein, who made it possible. But neither tack seems altogether satisfactory. Stein's pronouncements on war remain troubling. And unlike some of her contemporaries, even those with well-known political lives -- Samuel Beckett, for example, who similarly experienced the war in France up close, yet who chose to keep his aesthetic and political lives apart -- Stein's reflections on the wars she has seen are all over her writing and cannot so easily be bracketed.
ISSN:0040-4691
1534-7303
DOI:10.7560/TSLL58201