Gertrude Stein has never been more widely read and taught than she is now, in her 125th anniversary year.  Many of her previously unavailable books have recently been reissued in paperback, and the Library of America has published a significant collection of her works.  Three Lives , Tender Buttons, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and even The Making of Americans, have become canonical texts for feminist and queer studies, modernist studies, and twentieth-century American studies.  Recent biographies of Stein, particularly Linda Wagner-Martin's Favored Strangers, have reached a wide audience.  Robert Wilson directed a new production of Four Saints in Three Acts a few years ago, and the New York Wooster Group gave a very successful Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights.

 As Stein's artistic and critical reception in the twentieth century has shown, her work has often been read for its modernist excess, its stylistic influence on her contemporaries such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, or Virgil Thomson, and its elitist l'art pour l'art appeal.  But it has also been read for its postmodern ideas of art as polysemic play with various modes of presence and absence.  While thus much of previous criticism has relied on analyses of Stein's aesthetics as a starting point for interpretation, more recent studies have begun to investigate Stein's cultural-political significance, to reevaluate her stance on the New Woman, on WWII fascism, on high and low culture, and on ethnic groups--and to draw new connections to very contemporary artists who claim Stein as one of their literary parents. 

 The papers in this panel represent the most current areas of interest in Stein-criticism.  Spanning the gamut of Stein's drama, poetry, and fiction, they show not only how Stein has made each of these genres her own, but how, because of Stein's continued presence, we finish the twentieth century with revised notions of what it means to be (post)modern, theatrical, ethnic, or lesbian, and what it means to write as a woman among the male authors who have shaped the modern and postmodern canon.  But just as past critical attention to Stein's work has been redirected to the works of her canonized male contemporaries, so have the voices of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or Joyce been excluded from this panel.  Instead, this panel aims to explore how Stein's poetics and performativities have shaped our literary-critical culture at the end of the 20th century. 

One of the assumptions of this panel is that, despite many critics' attempts to dismiss or downplay Stein's contribution to 20th century literature, her work required, and received, serious attention.  Hence, beginning the panel will be Kirk Curnutt's presentation "Gertrude Stein: Parody and the Problem of Celebrity."  In this paper, Curnutt investigates Stein's reputation and her portrayals in the 1920s popular press as a "self-advertiser of pseudo-intellectual antics," a Barnumesque figure adept at manipulating the American public's interest in quirky, peculiar personalities.  Accordingly, parodists claimed to discover in her unintelligible style the traits of a woman whose goal isn't to produce great art but to create a sensation.  Examining a select group of Stein-parodies, such as Don Marquis's 1914 New York Sun columns, the anonymous "When Harold Moos Got Gay With Helen Furr" (Vanity Fair, October 1923), and Frank Sullivan's "The Autobiography of Alice B. Sullivan" (New Yorker, July 1933), Curnutt shows how the primary anxiety Stein excited revolved around these allegations of unmerited celebrity.  He argues that Stein symptomized the danger that fame in a mass-media age was a product of low-brow hype, rather than high-brow artistic endeavor. While much traditional Stein-criticism eschews this question in order to affirm and interrogate (with Stein herself) Stein's authentic motives for literary production, Curnutt's extended investigation into Stein's popular-cultural reception is overdue and, while addressing the crucial questions of literary authority and authenticity today's scholars face as they revise the literary canon at the end of this century, will open up an important new perspective at Stein's work.

Another of the assumptions of this panel is that Stein's work has had a wider influence on twentieth-century literature than heretofore studied. As Sonja Streuber's paper, "The Domino-Effect:  Black Femininity in Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, and Toni Morrison" shows, Stein's depiction of black female sexuality in her story, "Melanctha," to this day, resonates both thematically and stylistically in portrayals of black female sexuality in the works of African-American women writers.  While "Melanctha" has often been condemned for its allegedly racist or primitivistic characterization of African-Americans, some black modernists, among them Nella Larsen, praised its realism and creativity.  As Stein challenges the derogatory image of the black woman as a lascivious sexual aggressor, she helps validate black women's struggles to claim the right to their sexuality and intellectuality.  Nella Larsen, in Quicksand (introduced to Knopf by Stein's friend Carl Van Vechten), and in Passing, employs several of Stein's techniques, such as the split between sexual self and social respectability, the psychological point-of-view, repetition, and the syncopated rhythm reminiscent of black musical styles.  She also expands on Stein's thematic material, from women's mixed-race identity to death-by-marriage and intimations of salvation through same-sex erotic bonding.  Toni Morrison's work, of which Streuber discusses The Bluest Eye and Beloved, then, expands on the narrative and some of the content-based parameters Larsen has developed from Stein's story, showing how, to this day, the discourse on black female sexuality that Stein has opened up remains not only relevant, but, in fact, crucial to our understanding of black female subjectivity at the end of this century.  Only in recent years has Stein criticism begun to explore ethnicity in Stein's work, but comparative studies with African-American modern and postmodern writers are still in the beginning stages. 

But Stein's work has also made a significant impact on contemporary poetry, as Georgette Fleischer's paper, "Quoting the Quotidian Gertrude:  the Intellectual Stein in Lyn Hejinian, the Sensual Stein in Carol Maso," demonstrates.  Arguing that Stein provides Hejinian with a radical, highly self-conscious language practice, the theory of which Hejinian articulates in her Stein talks and the practice of which Hejinian herself employs, Fleischer investigates the direct correspondence between Tender Buttons and Hejinian's My Life and Stein's Stanzas in Meditation and Hejinian's Writing as an Aid to Memory.  Where Hejinian admires Stein most for her capacious mind and her philosophy of grammar, Carole Maso admires Stein most for her capacious appetite.  In her performance-essay "Carole Maso on Gertrude Stein," delivered at the New York poet's house in December 1998, Maso combines scraps of Lifting Belly, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and Tender Buttons, to create (and to consume poetically) what Fleischer calls "the edible Stein."  As Fleischer's paper shows, Stein has not only influenced contemporary women's poetry philosophically and structurally, as critics have heretofore assumed, but also through its attention to the materiality of the object and through the history of its production. Twofold discussions, such as this one, mark a new step in Stein-criticism and in the continuing investigation into contemporary poetry and poetics.

The final paper in this panel, Ehren Fordyce's "The Legacy of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights to American Postmodern Theatre," expands on the materiality of Stein and critically interrogates her impact on postmodern directorial practice. Fordyce looks at various productions of Stein's play, from the 1951 Living Theatre production in New York and the 1979 Judson Poet's Theatre production to music by Al Carmine, to Richard Forman's 1982 French version, La Fête Electrique, Robert Wilson's 1992 production in Berlin, and the recent Wooster Group staging at the Performing Garage in New York's Soho.  Comparing these productions reveals, so Fordyce, that the flexibility of the play's characters in reinterpreting their own histories within the Faust legend has fueled the concerns of postmodernism, with its emphasis on the right, and even responsibility, of interpreters to redescribe canonical texts.  All these productions have recognized the appealing ways in which the play raises basic questions for postmodernism:  how history, technology, and identity interrelate, and how a play can combine the continuities of plot with the discontinuities of a fragmented subjectivity.  Tracing these questions through the answers each production attempts to give, Fordyce shows how Stein's dramatic aesthetic challenges the forms and definitions of drama and theatre in today's context of modernist and postmodernist performances. Such an approach is not only new (the only published comparative studies on Stein's theatre are Betsy Ryan's Gertrude Stein's Theatre of the Absolute of 1984, and Jane Palatini Bowers' "They Watch me As They Watch This" of 1991); it is also topical:  recent development in performance studies have shown how the boundaries between drama and theatre, text and performance, actor and director, have become destabilized.  Fordyce's paper argues that Stein's theatre has played an instrumental part in generating this continuous renewal of theatre form. 

As may have become clear, this panel aims to collect new areas of investigation into the lasting effect Stein's work has had on twentieth-century literary and artistic creation.  Apart from addressing all genres of Stein's oeuvre, its contributions span various critical approaches, from feminist and ethnic to popular cultural and performance studies.  Hence, the work assembled here gives a representative cross-section of the new directions into which Stein-studies are headed, and into which a culture is headed of which Stein has called herself the Mother.  As such, this panel is more than just an author panel that celebrates Gertrude Stein's 125th anniversary; it represents a larger, yet timely, investigation into Stein's significance for present-day American intellectual culture. 

Sonja Streuber, organizer, chair, and presenter, is a Ph.D. candidate in English, Critical Theory, and Women's Studies at the University of California at Davis, where she also teaches.  Her Fulbright-decorated dissertation project, "Strange Bodies:  The Politics of the Feminine Grotesque in American Art," aims to challenge preconceived genre definitions of grotesque art by arguing for a restructuring of the grotesque canon to include major American women artists, from Gertrude Stein to Toni Morrison and Karen Finley.  Streuber has published on Stein, Whitman, and Robert Lowell, has given several conference papers at nationally renowned conferences (a.o. the MLA Conference in Chicago, 1995), and has previous panel-chairing experience. 

Kirk Curnutt is Associate Professor in English at Troy State University Montgomery (Alabama).  He is the author of Wise economies: brevity and storytelling in American short stories.  Moscow : University of Idaho Press, 1997, in which he deals, among others, with the questions of authorial self-fashioning and literary sensationalism that he will address in his paper.  He has demonstrated his scholarship in modernist American Literature through various articles, among others, " Parody and Pedagogy: teaching style, voice, and authorial intent in the works of Gertrude Stein.  College Literature v23, n2 (June, 1996):1-25. 

Georgette Fleischer will have finished her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University by September 1999.  Her dissertation deals with women writers' responses to National Socialism and World War II.  Her dissertation chapter on Stein focuses on Stein's later works, particularly Mrs. Reynolds, Wars I Have Seen and Brewsie and Willie.  She has published on Djuna Barnes, on women  writers and fascism, and on postmodern poetics in The Nation, Contemporary Literature, Studies in the Novel, and The Germanic Review.

Ehren Fordyce is Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Loyola College in Maryland.  He holds various degrees in Theater and Dramatic Art from the Sorbonne and Columbia University.  His latest article, "House of Stein:  The Wooster Group's House/Lights," which appeared in Theatre Forum, Summer 1998, will serve as background for the expanded presentation he plans to give.  Fordyce has presented his work in performance studies at the 1996 MLA Convention in Washington DC and at the 1998 MLA Convention in San Francisco.

All presenters have been informed that papers are to be 15-17 minutes in length in order to provide enough discussion time.  Since the number of submissions for this session was enormous, the panel leader expects a large audience turnout, whose desire to discuss Stein will be honored by keeping exact track of time.