|
||
Modern Literature Reading Series |
||
| Gertrude
Stein: Rose is a Rose 4 p.m. Wednesday, October 17 Special Collections 5th floor, Olin Library All are welcome. Reception after. |
 |
|
|
Modern Literature Collection |
On Wednesday, October 17 Special Collections will host a reading focusing on the writing and influence of Gertrude Stein. Steven Meyer, Associate Professor of English will give introductory remarks, and poets Margaret Funkhouser and Michelle Boese will read selections from Stein's writings as well as their own poems. The Modern Literature Reading Series began in the Fall of 2000 with a reading centering on the poetry of May Swenson. The purpose of the series is to celebrate the careers and influence of authors in the Modern Literature Collection. We invite local and visiting writers to read selections of the featured author's work and of their own. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania to wealthy German-Jewish immigrants. She attended Radcliffe College, where she studied psychology under William James. After leaving Radcliffe, she enrolled at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, but left without a degree in 1901. In 1903, Stein moved to Paris: she did not
return to the United States for over thirty years. In 1907, she met Alice
B. Toklas, who became her lifelong companion and secretary. Her first book,
Three Lives, was published in 1909. She followed it with Tender Buttons
in 1915. Her writing received considerable interest from other artists
and writers, but did not find a wide audience. Gertrude Stein died at the
American Hospital at Neuilly on July 27, 1946, of inoperable cancer.
Stephen Meyer, is Associate Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches modern and contemporary poetry. His study Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science, published by Stanford University Press, examines Stein's radically experimental writing in terms of late 19th- and early 20th-century, as well as late 20th-century, literary, philosophical, psychological and neurophysiological contexts. He has published articles on the poets Geoffrey Hill, John Ashbery, and Laura Riding, and is editing Stein's complete lectures for Stanford University Press. A native of Rockford, Illinois, Michelle Boese is a senior majoring in math at Washington University. Margaret Funkhouser is a poet in the MFA Program at Washington University. Mary Jo Bang is the author of Apology for Want, Louise in Love, and The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans. She is also poetry coeditor of Boston Review and is Assistant Professor of English at Washington University. Her poems have appeared in New American Writing, Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. |
|
|
||
![[header graphic]](headerplain.jpg)
![[footer graphic]](footer3.jpg){kind=small}