Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens : negotiating the act of modern consciousness

Literary modernists inherited a self that was fallible, a self that was seen as an ultimately failed gesture of expression, and throughout much modern literature is a sense of disillusionment with more traditional, expressivist notions of selfhood. As more conventional ways of thinking about consciousness became suspicious, so too did conventional models of artistic expression. One modern strategy for dealing with this disillusionment was to ironize the artistic subject by framing it within various self-conscious gestures. Modern writers grappling with a highly determined notion of consciousness often articulated its status in theatrical terms—as a performance of sorts, in a highly theatrical world. Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens provide powerful examples of the modern attempt to stage the modem subject. This dissertation examines particular kinds of "staging," both literal and metaphoric, in the plays and poetry of Stein and Stevens. By positing a staged or performed self, each writer negotiates some degree of agency for the artistic voice which must discover itself through its external relationships at the same time that it creates itself anew by challenging and renewing those determining forces.