Beyond the Sentence – Stein as Open Text

Featuring Lyn Hejinian, Anneke Brassinga, Adam Frank, Kate Briggs, Moosje Goosen, Solveig Daugaard, Martin Glaz Serup, Mia You, Flora Woudstra, Lucie Fortuin, Tim Elfring, Sophie Barklamb & I Poor Romantic

A co-production of Gertrude Stein European Network, Perdu and Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON)’s Modern and Contemporary Literature Research Group (Utrecht University). Organized by Mia You, Tim Elfring and Sophie Barklamb (Utrecht University), and Flora Woudstra and Lucie Fortuin (Perdu)

During this daylong symposium on the modernist writer Gertrude Stein, we will bring together both academic and artistic research to explore Stein’s writings as both the result of and catalyst for creative, collaborative engagements. We’ll consider how both Stein and her readers have positioned her work within various media ecologies and, ultimately, test the possibilities of reading it as an “open text.” As Lyn Hejinian writes in “The Rejection of Closure:” “The ‘open text,’ by definition, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies.” The “open text” also rejects the definitive boundaries of different media and disciplines; thus, lectures and roundtable discussions will be interspersed with readings, collaborative translations, and music and dance performances.

The keynote lecture will be delivered by poet, translator and essayist Lyn Hejinian (John F. Hotchkis Professor of English at U.C. Berkeley).

A detailed program will be posted here.

Tickets can be bought here.

Mark you calendars: we have a date. 6 April 2019. See you in Amsterdam!

Photo: Paul Lightfoot and the Nederlands Dans Theater’s “Shutters Shut,” based on Gertrude Stein’s “If I Told Him: A Complete Portrait of Picasso.”

The Gertrude Stein Society will hold two panels at the 29th American Literature Association conference

The Gertrude Stein Society will hold two panels at the 29th American Literature Association conference, May 24-27, 2018, at Hyatt Regency San Francisco.

Gertrude Stein and The Mother of Us All

Following the recent and dramatically innovative production of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s The Mother of Us All at the Hudson Opera House, the GSS seeks papers dealing with any aspect of this opera.  Papers may discuss the recent production of the opera, any previous productions, and/or the libretto, and possible topics include details and particulars of production; reception; original and/or contemporary socio-historical context; or textual analysis, among other possibilities.

How to Read The Making of Americans: A Roundtable Discussion

The GSS seeks participants for a roundtable discussion on ways of reading The Making of Americans.  Led by Cecilia Konchar Farr at St. Catherine University, this roundtable will be an opportunity for several scholars currently developing a reading guide to share their work-in-progress and foster discussion about others’ approaches to the novel.

Please email an abstract of 250 words together with current cv to Amy.Robbins@hunter.cuny.edu.  Deadline: January 15, 2018.  All submissions will receive an email acknowledging receipt.