Open AccessContingency as Medium in Gertrude Stein
Author(s) -
Christine Savinel
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
synthesis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1791-5856
pISSN - 1791-5155
DOI - 10.12681/syn.20892
Subject(s) - contingency , event (particle physics) , contingency plan , biography , psychoanalysis , history , literature , art history , epistemology , psychology , philosophy , art , computer science , physics , computer security , quantum mechanics
Gertrude Stein questions the event as an external and contingent accident, to be at least subsumed within the continuum of thinking —the untimely flux of interiormeditation and creation. Throughout her prolific production, one of Stein’s majorattempts was to do away with the event in literature, to dispense with it, to play against it. Stein pointedly selected as her topic the contingency of life within historical time, in her several autobiographical texts from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1932) to Wars I Have Seen (1944). Wars I Have Seen proves to be a singular work which helps us realise the process through which Stein resists historical contingency. As this essay argues, Wars I Have Seen gives us a remarkable vision of Stein trying to resist the pressure of History, and a vision of literature trying to hold at bay the contingency of events.