The Making of Americans in Paris: The Autobiographies of Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein

ISBN-13: 9781433101045 / Angielski / Twarda / 2008 / 195 str.

Sloboda, Noel

Opis

While living in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century, expatriate American writers Edith Wharton (1862-1937) and Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) never crossed paths. Even so, they did rub shoulders in print, in autobiographical essays published by The Atlantic Monthly in 1933. Noel Sloboda shows that the authors pursued many of the same professional goals in these essays and in the book-length life writings that grew out of them, A Backward Glance (1934) and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). By analyzing the personal and cultural contexts in which these works were produced, as well as subjects common to both of them, Sloboda illuminates a previously unrecognized solidarity between Wharton and Stein. The relationship between the authors is built upon careful analysis of A Backward Glance and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and it is framed by a consideration of the markets into which their life writings were first released. The alignment of Wharton and Stein as life writers will be of interest to those studying autobiography, modern literature, and American women writers.

Recenzje

"Reading this book, one comes to appreciate the quality of mind at work in the analysis that brings these two writers together in a fascinating new light. Sloboda judiciously moves between the lives and the life writing without relying on ready-made categories from literary history or theory, uncovering significant patterns and illuminating their implications while suggesting fruitful avenues for further exploration for scholars interested in Wharton and Stein, the period, and the genres of life-writing. Part critical analysis, part narrative, imminently readable, this book weaves a subtle argument about the personal motivations that shape the autobiographies. Nowhere is this more apparent - nowhere are the two writers more compellingly connected - than in Sloboda's insights into paradox of how the writers found unique opportunities for representing themselves by adopting (and in ways refashioning) popular genres such as travelogue, celebrity-portrait, and war remembrance." (Chuck Sweetman, Assistant Director, Writing Coordinator of English and American Literature, University College Washington University in St. Louis Campus)
"To answer Stein's famous question, there is a there there indeed - a set of productive parallels between Wharton the novelist of manners and Stein the budding Dada poet; a fertile combination of two women who were literary modernists, Parisian-Americans, and unorthodox autobiographers alike; yet the full, fascinating study of each of these writers deserves. Sloboda respects each writer's uniqueness, and yet places both upon a Parisian landscape that they tried to describe from their American readers' provincial point of view; casts the imposing shadow of Henry James across their respective careers and aspirations; and shows both authors reflecting retrospectively on the rarer, finer Europe they had lost after World War I. Sloboda's unusual pairing of authors illuminates subtle, common answers to questions of how to accommodate unconventional, "unfeminine" lives within traditional conventions of women's autobiography, how to render a bohemian existence abroad for audiences that felt content with mundane familiarities at home, and how to make and remake such unique American lives - write and rewrite such unique American autobiographies - as those of Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein." (Adam Sonstegard, Assistant Professor, English Department, Cleveland State University)

O autorze

The Author: Noel Sloboda earned his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis. He has taught at both the high school and the college level. Since 2002, he has worked at Penn State York, where he has earned awards for teaching and advising. Sloboda has contributed to literary references, scholarly journals, and essay collections. He also composes verse and has published more than 80 poems in small journals and magazines in the United States and abroad.