CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN AUTHORSCONTEMPORARY AMERICAN AUTHORS:: Michael Cunningham

Biography

Michael Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1952 and grew up in Pasadena, California. He received his BA in English literature from Stanford University and his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. His novel A Home at the End of the World was published by FSG in 1990 to wide acclaim. Flesh and Blood, another novel, followed in 1995. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Redbook, Esquire, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Vogue, and Metropolitan Home. His short story White Angel was chosen for Best American Short Stories 1989.

Biography

He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1988, and a Michener Fellowship from the University of Iowa in 1982.In 1999 Michael Cunningham received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for The Hours.Michael Cunningham currently lives in New York City.

Columbia University Provost Jonathan R. Cole (right) presents Michael Cunningham with the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) The Poet as Master of Repetition

“The most radical of the modernists because more than any of the others, she realized that a truly revolutionary modern art needed to begin from a radical act of definition or redefinition of the domain of the elements and the operations of the art or of art itself.”

David Antin

Bibliography

• Three Lives (1909)• White Wines (1913)• Tender buttons (1914)• An Exercise in Analysis (1917)• A Circular Play (1920)• Geography and Plays (1922)• The Making of Americans (1925)• Four Saints in Three Acts (1929)• Useful Knowledge (1929)• How to Write (1931)• They must. Be Wedded. To Their Wife• Operas and Plays (1932)• The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

(1933)• Lectures in America (1935)

• The Geographical History of America (1936)• Everybody's Autobiography (1937)• Picasso (1938)• Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938)• Paris France (1940)• Ida: A Novel (1941)• Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters (1943)• Wars I Have Seen (1945)• Reflections on the Atom Bomb (1946)• Brewsie and Willie (1946)• The Mother of Us All (1946)• Last Operas and Plays (1949)• The Things as They are (1950)• Patriarchal Poetry (1953)• Alphabets and Birthdays (1957)

The Young Genius

Gertrude was eight when she made her first attempt at writing. Reading became an obsession for her beginning with Shakespeare and books on natural history. Gertrude's love affair with words would later reveal itself in her own works. In school she was fascinated with the structuring of sentences.

"I suppose other things may be more exciting to others...I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves."

27 Rue de Fleurus

"I have lived half my life in Paris, not the half that made me but the half in which I made what I made.“

"Paris was the place that suited those of us that were to create the twentieth century art and literature..."

Stein’s brother moved to Paris and took up residence at 27 Rue de Fleurus. Gertrude joined him in 1904, and would not touch foot upon American soil again for thirty years... soon becoming a legend in her own time.

Their home became known as the “Salon” with paintings literally covering all the wall space in their modest living quarters. Paintings by Picasso, Renoir, Gauguin, Cezanne, and many others overflowed into every room of the household.

Soon "27" became so popular as a sanctuary for artists and writers.

"I was and still am satisfied with my portrait, for me it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me."

Three Lives (1909)

Gertrude Stein's first published work. The book is separated into three stories:

• The Good Anna • Melanctha• The Gentle Lena

“Mathilda Haydon, the simple, fat, blonde, older daughter felt very badly that she had to say that this was her cousin Lena, this Lena who was little better for her than a nigger. Mathilda was an overgrown, slow, flabby, blonde, stupid, fat girl, just beginning as a woman; thick in her speech and dull and simple in her mind, and very jealous of all her family and of other girls, and proud that she could have good dresses and new hats and learn music, and hating very badly to have a cousin who was a common servant. And then Mathilda remembered very strongly that dirty nasty place that Lena came from and that Mathilda had so turned up her nose at, and where she had been made so angry because her mother scolded her and liked all those rough cow-smelly people.”

Tender Buttons: objects, food, rooms (1914)

Stein’s innovative writing emphasizes the sounds and rhythms rather than the sense of words. By departing from conventional meaning, grammar and syntax, she attempted to capture “moments of consciousness,” independent of time and memory.

A BOX“Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle. So then the order is that a white way of being round is something suggesting a pin and is it disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to be analysed and see a fine substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again. "

Geography and Plays (1922)

Geography and Plays, a collection of poems, plays and descriptions of people and places that is rich with puns, rhythmic phrases, and the word repetitions that had become characteristic of her style.

“Rose is a rose is a rose is a roseLoveliness extreme.

Extra gaiters,Loveliness extreme.Sweetest ice-cream.

Pages ages page ages page ages.”

The Making of Americans (1925)

The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress is a modernist novel by Gertrude Stein. The novel traces the genealogy, history, and psychological development of members of the fictional Hersland and Dehning families. Stein employs a limited vocabulary and relies heavily on the technique of repetition. Her unusual use of the present participle is one of the most commonly noted features of the text.

• “It happens very often that a man has it in him, that a man does something, that he does it very often that he does many things, when he is a young man when he is an old man, when he is an older man.”

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)

• The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a 1933 book, written in the guise of an autobiography authored by Alice B. Toklas, who was Gertrude Stein’s longtime companion and lover.

• The descriptions of life in Paris and the famous people Stein had known made the book wildly popular in Europe and the United States.

• The commercial success that came with it enabled Stein to live a more prosperous lifestyle.

TheThe basic features of Stein’s writingbasic features of Stein’s writing

The idea of her art: to find a new way of looking at the world;

Show the conscious mind in writing;Made her own English language into an

entirely new language by throwing away the rules of traditional grammar and made words act in completely new ways.

TheThe basic features of Stein’s writingbasic features of Stein’s writing

Composition was a subject of much in her writing in two senses:

First, the attention of the reader is directed not to the meaning of the words themselves but to their interactions;

Second, the emphasis on the composition roots her work in continuous present – the idea that “all knowledge is held within the experience of the present. This is what is real. Reality in now, and this present is in continual flux.”

The basic features of Stein’s writingThe basic features of Stein’s writing

• Stein raised basic question in her work about the nature and properties of language, or more specifically American English and how else its words might be used.

• The primary concern of her work is not so much what words represent but rather with language itself and how words interact with one another to create their own aesthetic pleasure.

The basic features of Stein’s writingThe basic features of Stein’s writing

• The creation of aesthetic objects made out of words is in one sense a central definition of poetry, yet in another sense it seems a minor endeavor, sacrificing deeper emotional and intellectual possibilities for elaborate and sometimes highly technical wordplay that serves language from its personal and social moorings.

• Stein subordinates the meaning of words to the beauty of words themselves.

• The poet lays “word against word, relating sound to sound, feeling for the taste, the smell, the rhythm of the individual word”.

The Principles behind Stein's Work

• Commonality• Essence• Value• Grounding the Continuous present• Play • Transformation

Conclusions

• Stein’s contribution to twentieth-century poetry was a substantial one.

• She gave writers a sense of the fluidity and flux of the language, how loosely it held together compared to the static and traditional structures.

• She proved that words detached from anything can lead to anything and in Stein’s poetry they almost always do.

• Gertrude Stein's repetitive language can be said to refer to the changing quality of language in time and history.

• She drastically revised the way in which a great many contemporary American poets think of their art.

Guidelines for further reading

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15408 (To download Three Lives Stories)

http://www.bartleby.com/140/ (To download Tender Buttons)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8cSXVNn92s (Gertrude Stein reading of If I Told Him-

A Completed Portrait Of Picasso)

• A. Shucard, F. Moramarco, W. Sillivan, Modern American poetry 1865-1950, 1990;

• Hart, J. D. The Oxford Companion to American Literature, 1983;

• University Press.• Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of

Literature, 1995;• J. Bowers, Gertrude Stein, 1993• D. Sutherland, Gertrude Stein, A biography of

Her Work, 1951;• J. Walker, The Making of Modernist, 1984.

Thank you for your attention.