Surface Forms
Surface Forms
Photography and Gertrude Stein’s Contact History of Modernism
This chapter investigates how Gertrude Stein plays with the Künstlerroman. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), she offers her own assessment of the position of the artist in a saturated media marketplace. Reading The Autobiography alongside Stein's other work, the chapter examines Stein's deployment of photographic illustrations, tropes, and techniques as a crucial strategy in her attempt to picture the history of modernism and to secure her spot within it. In particular, The Autobiography's underexamined photographs show how an ostensibly formless form—the surface—becomes the instrument of Stein's experimental history, as she skims across major developments in modernist and avant-garde art and literature and touches on as many famous figures as possible. In this way, while earlier chapters discuss the forms that populate modernist texts or the formal theories that purport to elucidate them, the chapter turns to the forms taken by modernism itself, which takes shape in the “contact zone” of The Autobiography.
Keywords: Gertrude Stein, Künstlerroman, photography, modernism, surface forms, modernist art, avant-garde art, modernist literature, avant-garde literature
Cornell Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
