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Review of Karin Cope, Passionate collaborations: learning to live with Gertrude Stein

Faculty Advisor

Date

2006

Keywords

Stein\, Gertrude, literary criticism

Abstract (summary)

With Passionate Collaborations, Karin Cope hopes to explore a literary criticism beyond poststructuralist theory, finding existing interpretative tools unsatisfactory for reading the texts of Gertrude Stein. It has taken Cope more than twenty years and a thousand discarded manuscript pages to find the voice to address her subject, and she here embraces a spirit of collaboration, merging a respect for cooperation with a sense of compromise, as one way forward. Stein’s own collaborations, primarily with her relatives and literary friends, fueled her career, but they also blurred distinctions between Stein’s creative achievement and the influence of those people around her. One of the features that distinguished Stein’s approach from any of her contemporaries was her unwillingness to acknowledge the conventions of genre in her writing: she wrote about literature, for example, in the same manner as she composed her plays. In this spirit of collaboration, Cope fashions her appreciation of Stein in defiance of the conventions of criticism. Hers is a highly personal reading of the works that incorporates personal observation, mirroring her subject’s writing of her own life across a number of her texts.

Publication Information

Monk, Craig. Review of "Karin Cope, Passionate Collaborations: Learning to Live With Gertrude Stein." Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 60.2 (Fall 2006): 37-38. Web. 27 Nov. 2015.

DOI

Notes

Item Type

Review

Language

English

Rights

All Rights Reserved