2 - Complete Understanding

Summary

Contemporary literary criticism has largely turned away from hermeneutics to a constructivist approach. Stein's work, which tends to be used as a test case for new critical perspectives, has been at the heart of this development. Astrid Lorange, in her wonderful How Reading Is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein, for example, wants to liberate Stein from a hermeneutical framework. “The problem […] with hermeneutical modes of interpretation,” Lorange quotes Steven Shaviro, “is that they reduce the unknown to already-known, the already determined.” For Stein, Lorange outlines, this has meant a history of criticism that either highlights the polysemy of her texts, locating meaning in (indeterminate) language, or decodes, locating meaning in her life and world. The constructivist approach of Lorange's book draws on the affinity between the projects of A. N. Whitehead and Stein to argue for a mediated readerly engagement with Stein's writings. Via a whole list of other writers, from Epicurus to Tan Lin, she explores not what Stein's texts mean, but how they can be read expansively, in connection with a range of other texts and experiences. Her approach can be seen as part of a new critical practice, and the new understanding of reading central to it, of which Franco Moretti's distant reading project is the most famous example. In “Ways of Not Reading Gertrude Stein,” Natalia Cecire, for example, connects Stein's praxis of writing illegible texts to present-day debate about digital ways of “not-” or “distant” reading. The only way to engage with an illegible text, she points out, is to not-read it. As Tanya Clement has done, we might come up with an algorithm that maps the dynamics of The Making of Americans.

Lorange, Cecire and Clement draw on the network logic of Stein's poetics to counter a closed model of reading. At its most basic, what they do is radically expand the function of “context.” Context is no longer what a text refers to but what enables us, its readers, to construct a text. And that “text” might then consist of an index of abstractions to use, as in Lorange's Whitehead-informed reading, or of digital patterns, as in Clement, or of a not-to-be-read text as protest, as in Cecire. Meaning is not found, these critics show.