Gertrude Stein is a seminal figure in modern and postmodern literature, yet her work is not easily defined and has had both fierce supporters and equally fierce detractors. In a series of linked essays, How Reading Is Written considers a set of questions associated with reading Gertrude Stein today. In particular, how can we read a body of work that is largely resistant to conventional and interpretation-based models of literary criticism? The book is structurally and conceptually an index to Stein's poetics, and it considers Stein alongside other writers and thinkers, and across discourses of philosophy, science, queer theory, and literary criticism. Like Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael and Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, How Reading Is Written joins a tradition of books by poets about the writers who have intensely figured into their conception of poetry. Astrid Lorange recovers previously overlooked critical work on Stein and aims to construct a new intellectual episteme for Stein's work-one that connects with contemporary contexts as well as repositions Stein in her moment of transnational modernism.
""How Reading is Written is not about any old Stein. It is about Stein the linguistic innovator, the potential creator of the avant-garde tradition that so defines the last half of the twentieth century. So while this is a single author study, it is no old-fashioned single author study. It is, in short, a good read, a scholarship of homage and complication.""
