Overview

Gertrude Stein is recognized as an iconic and canonical literary modernist. In Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric, Sharon J. Kirsch broadens our understanding of Stein’s influence to include her impact on the field of rhetoric. For humanities scholars as well as popular audiences, the relationship between rhetoric and literature remains vexed, in part due to rhetoric’s contemporary affiliation with composition, which makes it separate from, if not subordinate to, the study of literature. Gertrude Stein recognized no such separation, and this disciplinary policing of the study of English has diminished our understanding of her work, Kirsch argues. Stein’s career unfolded at the crossroads of literary composition and rhetorical theory, a site where she alternately challenged, satirized, and reinvented the five classical canons of rhetoric - invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery - even as she invented new trajectories of literary experimentation. Kirsch follows Stein from her days studying composition and philosophy at Harvard through her expatriate years in France, fame in the 1930s, and experience of the Second World War. She frames Stein’s explorations of language as an inventive poetics that reconceived practices and theories of rhetorical invention during a period that saw the rise of literary studies and the decline of rhetorical studies. Through careful readings of canonical and lesser-known works, Kirsch offers a convincing critical portrait of Stein as a Sophistic provocateur who reinvented the canons by making a productive mess of canonical rhetoric and modernist categories of thought. Readers will find much of interest in Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric. Kirsch offers myriad insights to scholars of Stein, to those interested in the interdisciplinary intersections of literature, rhetoric, and philosophy, as well as to scholars and students in the field of rhetoric and communication studies. Positioning Stein as a major twentieth-century rhetorical theorist is particularly timely given increasing interest in historical and theoretical resonances between rhetoric and poetics and given the continued lack of recognition for women theorists in rhetorical studies.

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"""Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric recovers for the history of rhetoric an important theoretician whose work has received very little, if any, attention by historians or theorists of rhetoric. Kirsch makes a strong case for the inclusion of Stein in the rhetorical canon. As such, she lays the groundwork for a serious reconsideration of our understanding of rhetoric in the twentieth century."" --James Kastely, author of Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism ""This study of Gertrude Stein as Sophistic rhetorician contributes significant new knowledge of modernist literary practices for a multidisciplinary audience."" --Dale M. Smith, author of Poets Beyond the Barricades: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960"

-This study of Gertrude Stein as Sophistic rhetorician contributes significant new knowledge of modernist literary practices for a multidisciplinary audience.---Dale M. Smith, author of Poets Beyond the Barricades: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960

This study of Gertrude Stein as Sophistic rhetorician contributes significant new knowledge of modernist literary practices for a multidisciplinary audience. --Dale M. Smith, author of Poets Beyond the Barricades: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric recovers for the history of rhetoric an important theoretician whose work has received very little, if any, attention by historians or theorists of rhetoric. Kirsch makes a strong case for the inclusion of Stein in the rhetorical canon. As such, she lays the groundwork for a serious reconsideration of our understanding of rhetoric in the twentieth century. --James Kastely, author of Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism

This study of Gertrude Stein as Sophistic rhetorician contributes significant new knowledge of modernist literary practices for a multidisciplinary audience. --Dale M. Smith, author of Poets Beyond the Barricades: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric recovers for the history of rhetoric an important theoretician whose work has received very little, if any, attention by historians or theorists of rhetoric. Kirsch makes a strong case for the inclusion of Stein in the rhetorical canon. As such, she lays the groundwork for a serious reconsideration of our understanding of rhetoric in the twentieth century. --James Kastely, author of Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism This study of Gertrude Stein as Sophistic rhetorician contributes significant new knowledge of modernist literary practices for a multidisciplinary audience. Dale M. Smith, author of Poets Beyond the Barricades: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric recovers for the history of rhetoric an important theoretician whose work has received very little, if any, attention by historians or theorists of rhetoric. Kirsch makes a strong case for the inclusion of Stein in the rhetorical canon. As such, she lays the groundwork for a serious reconsideration of our understanding of rhetoric in the twentieth century. James Kastely, author of Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric recovers for the history of rhetoric an important theoretician whose work has received very little, if any, attention by historians or theorists of rhetoric. Kirsch makes a strong case for the inclusion of Stein in the rhetorical canon. As such, she lays the groundwork for a serious reconsideration of our understanding of rhetoric in the twentieth century. James Kastely, author of Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric recovers for the history of rhetoric an important theoretician whose work has received very little, if any, attention by historians or theorists of rhetoric. Kirsch makes a strong case for the inclusion of Stein in the rhetorical canon. As such, she lays the groundwork for a serious reconsideration of our understanding of rhetoric in the twentieth century. --James Kastely, author of Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism

This study of Gertrude Stein as Sophistic rhetorician contributes significant new knowledge of modernist literary practices for a multidisciplinary audience. --Dale M. Smith, author of Poets Beyond the Barricades: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960

This study of Gertrude Stein as Sophistic rhetorician contributes significant new knowledge of modernist literary practices for a multidisciplinary audience. Dale M. Smith, author of <i>Poets Beyond the Barricades: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960</i>

Author Information

Sharon J. Kirsch is an assistant professor of English and rhetorical studies in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University, USA. She is coeditor of Primary Stein and the author of articles and reviews that have appeared in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, The Feminist Wire, and Trivia: Voices of Feminism.

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