Literary Style
Among her meditations on French character and “civilisation,” Gertrude Stein’s Paris France (1940) includes a quick dismissal of the “sur-realist crowd”: That was really the trouble with the sur-realist crowd, they missed their moment of becoming civilized, they used their revolt, not as a private but as a public thing, they wanted publicity not civilisation, and so really they never succeeded in being peaceful and exciting.
Gertrude Stein is considered to be an avant-garde of surrealism, so this statement may seem contradictory. But Stein employs two literary styles in order to make this claim and stay within the sur-realist crowd.
This first style, surrealism, is a style of art and literature developed principally in the 20th century, stressing the subconscious or nonrational significance of imagery arrived at by automatism or the exploitation of chance effects, unexpected juxtapositions, etc. The second style is where Stein detracts from surrealism for a while to raise her opinions. This “Steinianism” is like surrealism in that it embraces the role in creating literary history, but instead of obsessing over revolt and originality it is concerned with the ideal of “civilization.” Both of these styles enable Stein to maintain a surrealist backdrop while still voicing her own ideals.
Read more about this topic: Paris France (novel)
Famous quotes containing the words literary and/or style:
“First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“On the first days, like a piece of music that one will later be mad about, but that one does not yet distinguish, that which I was to love so much in [Bergotte’s] style was not yet clear to me. I could not put down the novel that I was reading, but I thought that I was only interested in the subject, as in the first moments of love when one goes every day to see a woman at some gathering, or some pastime, by the amusements to which one believes to be attracted.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)